Bernard Hill’s five greatest roles: from Titanic to Boys from the Blackstuff

The death of the actor Bernard Hill at the age of 79 deprives Britain of one of its most versatile and talented actors. His demise is all the sadder for the knowledge that he was about to be seen on television tonight, playing Martin Freeman’s father in the second series of The Responder. Hill had not been as much of a presence in cinema or on TV over the past few years as he was in his heyday, whether by choice or circumstance, but when he did appear in anything, it was certain that he would add a remarkable degree of class and conviction to whatever role he played. From Shakespeare and Arthur Miller to big-budget special-effects fantasy, Hill could be guaranteed to give a weak project gravitas and a great one magnificence.

For a notably modest and unassuming man who shunned celebrity circles, it undoubtedly would have amused him that his two best-known roles came in the two pictures that won 11 Oscars apiece, the billion-dollar behemoths Titanic and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Hill had terrific roles in them both and showed Hollywood his worth as a fine character actor. Yet there was other, less widely seen work that may have resonated more with him given its quieter nature. To watch a Bernard Hill performance was seldom to see capital-A Acting; it was, instead, to see someone wholly inhabit a character without ostentation. Here are five of his finest hours.

Boys from the Blackstuff (1982)

Hill began his career with supporting appearances on stage and in television drama, but it was his early role as Jimmy “Yosser” Hughes in Alan Bleasdale’s legendary social-realist television series that first established him as a major actor. As the moustachioed, hapless and perennially unemployed Hughes, Hill gave his shabby and shambling career dignity as he was reduced to begging for work against the backdrop of Thatcherite enterprise. His catchphrases, including “Gizza job”, were both funny and pathetic, but Hill’s skill was to make Yosser sympathetic rather than pitiable, even as he is denied the pat happy ending that a lesser writer might have foisted on the character.

Shirley Valentine (1989)

Willy Russell’s one-woman monologue was opened out for cinema, and it took a remarkable actor to hold his own against Pauline Collins as the eponymous Shirley, frustrated with her lot in life and desperate to escape. Hill, playing her unthinkingly controlling husband Joe, excels at conveying the character’s casual sexism and entitlement, and plays much of this for broad laughs; he manages to make the scenes in which he reacts to his wife’s atypical flight to Greece as being dictated by menopause or mid-life crisis seem genuinely funny, rather than simply boorish.

Yet he is also offered redemption at the end when he finally heads to see her and understands that she is an independent human being in her own right, rather than his chattel. Roger Ebert, in an otherwise negative review, wrote “when he follows his wife to Greece at the end of the film, there are a few moments so truthful that they show up the rest.”

Titanic (1997)

From the Blackstuff to the most expensive film of all time is quite a stretch in anyone’s career, but if anyone could manage it, it was Hill. Splendidly white-bearded and stiff-upper-lipped as the real-life captain of the Titanic, Edward Smith, Hill excels at conveying the slight pomposity but also the enormous decency and eventual sacrifice of Smith, going down with his ship in one of the film’s most moving scenes.

Its mega-success launched Hill into a brief, unlikely career as a Hollywood character actor. He always remained deeply sanguine about the experience of working on a notoriously difficult and troubled shoot; he commented that what he had enjoyed most about the role was the opportunity to work with his friend and former colleague David Warner, and that the experience of making it was “kind of a group thing... everybody really liked each other and there was no strain. It was quite intimate.”

The Two Towers/The Return of the King (2001/2002)

If Smith was noble, then Hill’s performance in the second and third Lord of the Rings films as King Théoden was heroic, although not without its own arc. The viewer is introduced to him in the grip of possession by Saruman, via the vicious Wormtongue, and when the spell is dispelled, Théoden is allowed to take arms against the forces of evil and to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Gandalf, Aragorn and the rest of them.

Hill gets one of the most memorable moments in the trilogy in the third film, at the Battle of the Pelennor Fields scene; no longer the enfeebled figure that he once was, he delivers a stirring battle cry (“Ride now, ride now! Ride for ruin, and the world’s ending!”) as he leads the forces of the Rohirrim in a death-or-glory charge against apparently impossible odds. It remains incredibly thrilling, over two decades on, and it is testament to Hill’s powerful yet wholly subtle work that it would be a rare viewer who did not want to take up arms alongside him.

A Very Social Secretary (2005)

Hill played real-life figures throughout his career, from Captain Smith to the so-called “Canoe Man” John Darwin. Yet perhaps his most intriguing and effective performance of this kind came when he played former Home Secretary David Blunkett in a comedy-drama about the furore that ensued when Blunkett had an affair with Kimberley Quinn, former publisher of the Spectator magazine, and was dragged into controversy when he was accused of offering her special treatment and thereby abusing his office.

Although the show itself often descends into broad farce, Hill’s performance – for which he was nominated for both a BAFTA and an Emmy, neither of which, unfathomably, he ever won – is wholly sympathetic, showing the extent to which he managed to overcome his blindness to rise to the heights of political office, and also the way in which he could be figuratively blinded by lust. By the show’s end, as Blunkett comes to terms with the folly of his actions, Hill delivers a remarkable performance that may, after Yosser, be the best he ever gave on screen.