Sir Michael Murray Hordern (Oct 3, 1911 - May 2, 1995) was an extremely prolific English actor of stage, radio, screen, and television.
After his service as a lieutenant commander in the Royal Navy during World War II and a short stint as a schoolteacher, Hordern started appearing in supporting roles on the stage and played bit-parts in films. By the 1950s he had made a name for himself as one of the leading Shakespearean Actors of his generation and started to have larger film roles.
Although Hordern was largely known on screen as a supporting character actor rather than a lead actor, he often landed larger roles on television, particularly in BBC productions adapting stage plays or classical works of literature for the small screen. Due to his deep, rich voice, Hordern was also in high demand as a narrator, both on radio as well as live action films and animation. Among his voice roles, Hordern took great pride in being well-known to children in the 1970s for narrating the Paddington animated series. A lifelong avid fly-fisherman, Hordern also hosted a program called Rod and Line about recreational fishing on the BBC in 1982.
As an indication of how prolific Michael Hordern was, he appeared in three different film and television adaptations of A Christmas Carol and as the title king in two television adaptations of King Lear. He often appeared in films together with Harry Andrews, a similarly workaholic British character actor with a distinctive voice.
Hordern was knighted in 1983 and continued to act through his final years.
Selected filmography:
- Passport to Pimlico
- Scrooge (1951)
- Alexander the Great (1956)
- Sink the Bismarck!
- MacBeth (1960 TV movie)
- The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965 film)
- Genghis Khan (1965)
- The Bed Sitting Room
- Anne of the Thousand Days (1969 film)
- Khartoum
- Where Eagles Dare
- Up Pompeii
- A Christmas Carol (1971)
- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1972 film)
- Theatre of Blood
- The Three Musketeers (1973)note
- King Lear (1975 TV film)
- Mister Quilp
- Barry Lyndon
- Edward the Seventh
- Paddington (1975)
- A Christmas Carol (1975 TV film)
- The Medusa Touch
- Watership Down
- The Taming of the Shrew (1978 film)
- Romeo and Juliet (1979 TV film)
- The Tempest (1980 TV film)
- Ivanhoe (1982 film)
- King Lear (1982 TV film)
- Gandhi
- Oliver Twist (1982 film)
- Yellowbeard
- The Wind in the Willows (1983 film)
- Young Sherlock Holmes
- Freddie as F.R.O.7
- Middlemarch (1994 TV Series)
