Brian Cox

Brian Denis Cox was born in Dundee in 1946 and trained as a classical Shakespearean, which is the fact that explains almost everything about how he sounds. He holds two Laurence Olivier Awards for stage work, plus a Primetime Emmy for a supporting role in a miniseries, a Golden Globe, and two British Academy Television Award nominations. He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2003 New Year Honours.

On screen he has spent forty years playing men who decide things. Manhunter in 1986 gave him an early lead played with a chilling, amused stillness. After that the roles arrived in a steady procession of authority: Argyle Wallace in Braveheart, Agamemnon in Troy, Ward Abbott across two Bourne films, Melvin Belli in Zodiac, the executive in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. The register is always the same underneath, a man with more information than the person he is talking to, and complete comfort about it.

What is easy to miss is how funny he is when someone lets him be. Super Troopers, The Campaign, Rushmore and Adaptation all use him for comic authority, and he plays it beautifully dry. The Autopsy of Jane Doe is the sleeper: a small horror film set almost entirely in one room, and he anchors it with a level of seriousness the budget did not deserve.

Then, in his seventies, came Succession, and a man who had been a working character actor since the 1960s became internationally famous for the first time. It is a very late arrival at leading-man status, and he has taken it with obvious relish.