Biografia

As a reference to his loud booming voice, York University voted in 2011 to name its newly-built study centre "Brian Blessed Centre for Quiet Study".

He has been close friends with Patrick Stewart since childhood, when the two (both with a love of theatre) would hitch on coal wagons to London in order to see plays.

He is the oldest person to have reached both the geographical North Pole and the magnetic North Pole.

At age 14, he attended the Second World Peace Congress held in Sheffield during November 1950, where he encountered Pablo Picasso, challenging him to draw something. The artist penned a dove of peace, which the young Blessed scorned before sketching a similar bird himself and presenting it to an amused Picasso. Blessed would not accept Picasso's offer of his picture, thereby unwittingly earning his father's wrath.

As a child, he and his friends used to play at "Flash Gordon", inspired by the Buster Crabbe serial films. In these childhood games, Brian would always play "Vultan", leader of the Hawkmen. In the cult science fiction film Flash Gordon (1980), he played the same role as he had in childhood.

[on William Shakespeare] The blue planet has had its author. It would be greedy to want another.

[on Doctor Who (1963) in 1995] Like all the kind of traditional programmes on the BBC from the past, it is timeless and I do hope it comes back.

After I was in Z Cars (1962), the head of BBC serials took me aside and said, 'We're thinking of having a young Doctor Who (1963) and we'd like to cast you'. But it clashed with other things.

[on Doctor Who (2005)] I think they need to re-examine his surname - 'Who' is very oriental. It's about time they had an Asian actor as the Doctor. And a female one.

Women are my religion. 90 per cent of men have always bored the derriere off me as people.