Andrew Havill

Andrew Havill trained in Oxford and London, joined a repertory company in 1989, made his screen debut in 1993, and has since appeared in more than forty films and fifty plays. If you watch British period drama at all, you have seen him dozens of times without once catching his name.

He is the parson, the archbishop, the private secretary, the schoolmaster, the family solicitor. Robert Wood in The King's Speech, a teacher in The Imitation Game, Cochepaille in Les Miserables, Lord Lascelles in Downton Abbey, Robert Fellowes in The Crown, the Archbishop of Canterbury in The King, Parson Pascoe in My Cousin Rachel. Costume drama is a genre that only works when the rooms are full of people who look like they belong to the century, and that job is done by actors like Havill, who can carry a scene's institutional weight in two lines and then get out of the way.

Occasionally something with an edge comes along and he takes it: the video censor's world of Censor, the merchant-banking floor of Industry, the moral squeeze of The Children Act, The Frankenstein Chronicles. He remains, by design, one of the most-seen unrecognised faces in British film, which is a career most actors would take.