Robert Bathurst

Robert Guy Bathurst (born 22 February 1957) is an English actor.

Bathurst was born in The Gold Coast (now Ghana) in 1957, where his father was working as a management consultant.

Robert Guy Bathurst was born in Accra, Gold Coast (modern-day Ghana), on 22 February 1957 to Philip Charles Metcalfe Bathurst, a descendant of politician Charles Bathurst and kinsman of the Earls Bathurst and Viscounts Bledisloe, and his wife Gillian (née Debenham).

His father was a major in the Royal Engineers during the Second World War and was working in West Africa as a management consultant.

His mother was a physiotherapist.

They had two other children, Nicholas and Charlotte.

In 1959 his family moved to Ballybrack, Dublin, Republic of Ireland, and Bathurst attended school in Killiney and later was enrolled at Headfort, an Irish boarding school.

The family lived in Ghana until 1959, when they moved to Ballybrack, Dublin, Ireland.

Bathurst and his brother attended two schools in Dublin – the Holy Child School in Killiney and a school in Ballsbridge – before being sent to Headfort, a preparatory school in Kells, County Meath.

He compared the time he and his brother, who were Catholics, spent at the Anglican boarding school to Lord of the Flies; "we were incarcerated in a huge, stinking, Georgian house, where we were treated very brutally".

In 1966, the family moved back to England and Bathurst transferred to Worth School in Sussex, where he took up amateur dramatics.

At the age of 18, he read law at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and joined the Footlights group.

In 1966, the family moved to England and Bathurst was sent to board at Worth School in Sussex.

At the age of 13, he began acting in minor skits and revues and read old copies of Plays and Players magazine, "studying floor plans of theatres and reading about new theatres being built".

He had first become interested in acting when his family saw a pantomime at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin and he watched actors waiting for their cues in the wings.

Bathurst left Worth at the age of 18 to read law at Pembroke College, Cambridge.

He spent much of his time there performing in the Cambridge Footlights alongside Hugh Laurie, Rory McGrath and Emma Thompson.

From 1977 to 1978, he was the secretary of the group and, from 1978 to 1979, he was the president.

Among the Footlights Revues in which he participated were Stage Fright in 1978, which he also co-wrote and Nightcap in 1979.

He also directed and appeared in the Footlights pantomime Aladdin as Widow Twankey during the 1978–79 season.

He took the Bar Vocational Course at the University of Law, in London, which allowed him to go on to become a practising barrister, but stuck to acting instead.

After leaving Cambridge, Bathurst spent a year touring Australia in the Footlights Revue Botham, The Musical, which he described as "a bunch of callow youths flying round doing press conferences and chat shows".

Although he enjoyed his work with Footlights, he did not continue performing with the group, worrying that he would be "washed up at 35 having coat-tailed on their success through the early part of [his] career".

After leaving, he found that he was considered a dilettante, which resulted in it taking him longer than expected to be accepted as a serious actor.

His first professional role out of university was in the BBC Radio 4 series Injury Time, alongside fellow Footlights performers Rory McGrath and Emma Thompson.

He supplemented his stage roles in the 1980s with television roles, appearing in comedies such as the aborted pilot episode of Blackadder, Chelmsford 123, The Lenny Henry Show and the first episode of Red Dwarf.

His first role for television came in 1982, when he appeared as Prince Henry in the pilot episode of Blackadder.

He had already appeared in a training video by director Geoff Posner and got the role of Henry by way of thanks.

The character was recast and downgraded when the series was commissioned as The Black Adder.

Bathurst's professional stage debut came the next year when he joined the second cast of Michael Frayn's Noises Off at the Savoy Theatre.

After graduating, he took up acting full-time and made his professional stage debut in 1983, playing Tim Allgood in Michael Frayn's Noises Off, which ran for a year at the Savoy Theatre.

To broaden his knowledge of working on stage, he joined the National Theatre.

In 1991, he won his first major television role playing Mark Taylor in the semi-autobiographical BBC sitcom Joking Apart, written by Steven Moffat.

Although only thirteen episodes were made (between 1991 and 1995), the role remains Bathurst's favourite of his whole career.

After Joking Apart concluded, he was cast as pompous management consultant David Marsden in the ITV comedy drama Cold Feet, which ran for five series from 1998 to 2003 and again for four further series from 2016 to 2020.

Since 2003, Bathurst has played a fictional prime minister in the BBC sitcom My Dad's the Prime Minister, Mark Thatcher in the fact-based drama Coup! and a man whose daughter goes missing in the ITV thriller The Stepfather.

He also made a return to theatre roles, playing Vershinin in The Three Sisters (2003), Adrien in the two-hander Members Only (2006), government whip Alistair in Whipping it Up (2006–07), and the title role in Alex (2007, 2008).

In the following years, he starred in the television dramas The Pillars of the Earth (2010), Downton Abbey (2010), Hattie (2011) and joined the cast of Wild at Heart in 2012.

Bathurst appeared in his first Noël Coward play, Present Laughter in 2010 and followed it with a role in Blithe Spirit that same year and again in 2011.

He is married and has four children.