“Gizza job.” Two words, delivered in a hoarse plea, and for a few years in the early 1980s half of Britain seemed to be saying them, from the playground to the dole queue. They belonged to Yosser Hughes, and the man who gave Yosser his hollowed eyes and his head-butt was Bernard Hill, who died on May 5, 2024, aged 79.
His death was announced in a family statement released through Lou Coulson Associates, his talent agency. The statement did not say where he died or give a cause, the New York Times reported.
The man who was Yosser
Alan Bleasdale wrote the part of Yosser specially for him, which Hill found “a bit worrying”, given that the character communicates largely by butting people. Boys from the Blackstuff, the BBC series of 1982, followed out-of-work tarmac layers and was watched by more than five million people on first broadcast. It grew out of Bleasdale’s play The Black Stuff, written in 1978 and not screened until 1980. Many read it as an angry reply to Margaret Thatcher’s government, although four of its five episodes were written before she took office.
Hill built the look himself: smudged moustache, white make-up pushed to extremes, black clothes only. The role did not stay on set. “If you’re playing somebody who’s heading for insanity, you might as well go there yourself and see what it’s like,” he said in 1983. The Liverpool Echo called Yosser “a symbol of the desperation bred by unemployment”. The part earned Hill a BAFTA nomination.
From Blackley to Hollywood
He was born in Blackley, Manchester. His father served in the Royal Navy in the war and then became a miner; his mother worked in the kitchens of the ICI plant. Hill began training as a quantity surveyor, acted in an amateur group on the side, and was turned down twice by Rada. Teacher training at De La Salle College in Manchester came next, and there a part-time tutor, the director Mike Leigh, told him to commit to acting. Leigh had seen him with the Salford Players in 1968. “He was brilliant,” Leigh said. Hill went on to study theatre at Manchester Polytechnic, where Julie Walters was a classmate.
Leigh cast him in the television film Hard Labour in 1973. Two years at the Everyman in Liverpool followed, including John Lennon in Willy Russell’s John, Paul, George, Ringo … and Bert, which transferred to London, ran for a year and won the Evening Standard award for best musical. In 1976 he appeared as the Roman soldier Gratus in two episodes of I, Claudius. After Blackstuff he played the Duke of York in the BBC’s three-part Henry VI in 1983 and came back as First Murderer in Richard III.
The film credits ran long. A sergeant in Gandhi (1982). Lech Walesa in Tom Stoppard’s Squaring the Circle (1984). A coroner in Peter Greenaway’s Drowning By Numbers (1988). Bleasdale’s No Surrender (1985), in which he played a grim bouncer with a rockabilly quiff. The Guardian counted Bellman and True (1987), another worn-out father, among his best work after Yosser. He was sacked from Shanghai Surprise in 1986 after reportedly clashing with Sean Penn. Later work included Dennis Potter’s Lipstick on Your Collar (1993), The Ghost and the Darkness (1996) and True Crime (1999).
A second BAFTA nomination came for playing the former home secretary David Blunkett in A Very Social Secretary (2005), with Robert Lindsay as Tony Blair. He was the Duke of Norfolk in Wolf Hall in 2015 and, at the time of his death, was in the second series of The Responder.
Captain and king
Mass audiences knew him for two roles. In Titanic (1997) he was Captain Edward J. Smith, the man who, early in the film, tells a crew member to “stretch her legs”. In The Lord of the Rings, he was King Théoden of Rohan, in The Two Towers (2002) and The Return of the King (2003). Both Titanic and Return of the King won 11 Oscars, and Hill is the only actor to appear in two of the three films that have done so, the Manchester Evening News reported in 2022. The New York Times noted that he was also the first actor to star in more than one film grossing over $1 billion.
He is survived by a daughter, Jay, and a son, Gabriel.
Sources
- Bernard Hill obituary | Film | The Guardian
- Bernard Hill, Actor in ‘Titanic’ and ‘Lord of the Rings,’ Dies at 79 – The New York Times
