Robert Bathurst

Robert Guy Bathurst (born 22 February 1957) is an English actor. Bathurst was born in The Gold Coast (now Ghana) in 1957, where his father was working as a management consultant. In 1959 his family moved to Ballybrack, Dublin, Republic of Ireland, and Bathurst attended school in Killiney and later was enrolled at Headfort, an Irish boarding school. In 1966, the family moved back to England and Bathurst transferred to Worth School in Sussex, where he took up amateur dramatics. At the age of 18, he read law at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and joined the Footlights group.

After graduating, he took up acting full-time and made his professional stage debut in 1983, playing Tim Allgood in Michael Frayn's Noises Off, which ran for a year at the Savoy Theatre. To broaden his knowledge of working on stage, he joined the National Theatre. He supplemented his stage roles in the 1980s with television roles, appearing in comedies such as the aborted pilot episode of Blackadder, Chelmsford 123, The Lenny Henry Show and the first episode of Red Dwarf. In 1991, he won his first major television role playing Mark Taylor in the semi-autobiographical BBC sitcom Joking Apart, written by Steven Moffat. Although only thirteen episodes were made (between 1991 and 1995), the role remains Bathurst's favourite of his whole career. After Joking Apart concluded, he was cast as pompous management consultant David Marsden in the ITV comedy drama Cold Feet, which ran for five series from 1998 to 2003 and again for four further series from 2016 to 2020.

Since 2003, Bathurst has played a fictional prime minister in the BBC sitcom My Dad's the Prime Minister, Mark Thatcher in the fact-based drama Coup! and a man whose daughter goes missing in the ITV thriller The Stepfather. He also made a return to theatre roles, playing Vershinin in The Three Sisters (2003), Adrien in the two-hander Members Only (2006), government whip Alistair in Whipping it Up (2006–07), and the title role in Alex (2007, 2008). In the following years, he starred in the television dramas The Pillars of the Earth (2010), Downton Abbey (2010), Hattie (2011) and joined the cast of Wild at Heart in 2012. Bathurst appeared in his first Noël Coward play, Present Laughter in 2010 and followed it with a role in Blithe Spirit that same year and again in 2011. He is married and has four children.