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From Coronation Street to Harry Potter - remembering British acting legend Michael Byrne as he dies aged 82

British acting legend Michael Byrne has died at the age of 82, following a decades-long career where he appeared in Indiana Jones, Harry Potter and held a key role in Coronation Street

[Michael Byrne]

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Michael Byrne has died at the age of 82(Image: Donald Cooper/Shutterstock)

Few British actors have had a career as varied as Michael Byrne, having appeared in countless roles across both the big and small screen and on the stage over the course of six decades. On Tuesday, his family announced that he had died at the age of 82 on June 20.

Born in 1943 London to a single mother, who worked as a cook, Byrne had an early ambition to act and after leaving the Burgess Hill school in Hampstead, trained at the prestigious Central School of Speech and Drama.

The actor made a career out of supporting roles, having gained his big break in the early 1960s when he became part of Laurence Oliviers National Theatre Company at the Old Vic in 1963, where he appeared in numerous productions alongside the esteemed actor himself, as well as Dame Maggie Smith and a young Michael Gambon.

[Michael Byrne]

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The star had a varied career across British television and film (pictured in 1976 war drama The Eagle Has Landed)(Image: YouTube)

Around this time, he also stepped in front of the camera and starred in a string of British dramas like The Scarlett Blade, The Scarlett Playground, The Eagle Has Landed and The Image before going on to tread the boards in the West End for a number of years.

He starred alongside late actor Alan Bates, who became his lifelong friend, in Harold Pinter's production of the Simon Gray play Butley at the Criterion Theatre and later played Cassius in Shakespeare tragedy Julius Caesar.

Perhaps most surprisingly, in 2010, at the age of 67, Byrne starred in another Shakespeare play taking on the part of Romeo, traditionally a lovestruck teenager, who has been played by the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Holland over the years. Sin Phillips, then 77, played Juliet at the Bristol Old Vic. At the time, critics praised Byrne's "delicious rueful humour" in the role.

[Coronation Street]

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To Coronation Street fans, he is best known for playing the long lost father of Weatherfield legend Gail Platt (Image: ITV)

In the 1980s, he film career took off, and the acclaimed character actor found himself starring Spielbergs Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade alongside Harrison Ford and Sean Connery, and Mel Gibson classic Braveheart, where he played a Smythe, a soldier who attempts to rape William Wallace's wife and ultimately inspires Gibson's character to seek independence.

By the end of the 1990s, Byrne appeared in Tomorrow Never Dies alongside Pierce Brosnan as James Bond and, in 1998, played a concentration camp survivor in Apt Pupil.

On television, Byrne appeared in a handful of episodes of Smileys People, which starred Alec Guinness, and then more famously played the role of Ted Page on Coronation Street, arriving on the cobbles in 2008 as the long-lost father of Gail Platt.

Ted struck up a close friendship with Ken Barlow (William Roache), only for his acerbic mother-in-law Blanche Hunt (Maggie Jones) to humorously get the wrong end of the stick about the situation.

His character memorably gave his daughter away at her fifth ill-fated wedding, this time to Joe McIntyre (Reece Dinsdale), who died a short time later when trying to fake his own death as part of an insurance scam.

Byrne made his last appearance on the soap in January 2010, but, up until his character died off-screen in 2021, he was often mentioned by Gail.

For the last decade of his career, Byrne appeared in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1, where he played Gellert Grindelwald, then starred as Christiaan Barnard in the 2013 biopic Diana. In 2018, he appeared in The Last Witness and Intrigo: Death of an Author, before making his final on-screen appearance another adaptation of a JK Rowling work - Strike.

The veteran actor is survived by former wife Carole, who cared for him towards the end of his life. The pair met when he toured Ireland with the Arena Theatre Company in 1962 and married three years later. They had two daughters, Tara and Bryony, and three grandchildren, Tom, Chloe and Jasmine.

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