Robert Lindsay

Biography: An English actor who is best known for his television work, especially his roles of Wolfie Smith in Citizen Smith, Michael Murray in G.B.H., Captain Sir Edward Pellew in Hornblower and Ben Harper in My Family which has been on television screens since 2000.

Lindsay was born Robert Lindsay Stevenson in Ilkeston, Derbyshire, to Norman and Joyce Stevenson. After leaving Gladstone Boys school, Lindsay enrolled in the drama department of Clarendon College in Nottingham, intending to become a drama teacher. However, friends at Nottingham Playhouse encouraged him to apply to Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), and in 1968 he was accepted there with the aid of a government grant. After graduation he worked as dialect coach for a repertory company in Essex, and then joined a regional theatre group.

Lindsay first came to prominence as the cockney layabout Jakey Smith in the ITV comedy series Get Some In!, and he appeared in the fourth series of the BBC sitcom The Good Life. He was then given the starring role as incompetent revolutionary Wolfie Smith in the BBC sitcom Citizen Smith. He followed this with roles in a number of the BBC Television Shakespeare productions, including Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, and as Edmund in King Lear opposite Sir Laurence Olivier in 1983.

Lindsay has become familiar to a new generation of viewers as Ben Harper in the popular BBC sitcom My Family, which ran from 2000 until 2011. Zoe Wanamaker plays his on-screen wife Susan.

In October 2005 he starred in an ITV drama series Jericho. In January and February 2006, he appeared as Sneath in two loosely linked Stephen Poliakoff dramas, Friends and Crocodiles and Gideon?s Daughter, shown on BBC One. He was the only actor to appear in both productions.

He has also portrayed Prime Minister Tony Blair in the Channel 4 satires A Very Social Secretary and The Trial of Tony Blair. In 2003 he appeared in an episode in Absolutely Fabulous, and also narrated the BBC documentary series Seven Wonders of the Industrial World.

Lindsay sings the recorded version of Derby County Football Club?s song "Steve Bloomer?s Watchin?", played and sung by the fans at the beginning of every home game, and usually at the start of the second half and after a good win.

In 1974 Lindsay married Cheryl Hall, who later appeared alongside him in Citizen Smith. They divorced in 1980, when he started a long-term relationship with actress Diana Weston, with whom he has a daughter, Sydney Laura Stevenson (born 1988), who co-starred with him in three episodes of My Family. Since acting as Admiral Pellew in the Hornblower series, Lindsay has become good friends with the real Pellew family.

He then left Weston for actress/presenter Rosemarie Ford. The couple have two sons, Samuel Lindsay Stevenson (born 1999) and James Lindsay Stevenson (born 2003). The couple married on 31 December 2006.

Lindsay researched his family tree in the third series of Who Do You Think You Are?, which aired on 13 September 2006. He travelled to his hometown and to Turkey, where his grandfather Raymond Dunmore had taken part in the Gallipoli campaign during World War I. Lindsay has been a life-long supporter of Derby County F.C.

Lindsay is known for his left-wing politics. He describes himself as a staunch socialist, and has marched in the past in support of miners. He vehemently opposed Prime Minister Tony Blair?s decisions to go to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and now feels disillusioned with mainstream politics: "You see those images of Iraq and Afghanistan and Lebanon, don?t you? And I suspect somewhere, when he goes home at night and the kids are in bed, he must go, Jesus, what have I done?"