Bernard Hill, actor who shot to fame as Yosser Hughes in Boys From the Blackstuff – obituary

Bernard Hill, who has died aged 79, was a virtually unknown actor when he played the out-of-work Scouser Yosser Hughes in Alan Bleasdale’s Boys From The Blackstuff (1982), a role that make him not only a sought-after and bankable star but also minted a national catchphrase with his harrowing appeal “Gizza job! Go on, gizzit! I could do that!”

In what became a landmark in postwar television drama, Hill, playing the maniacal man in black with the Charlie Chaplin moustache, head-butted his way into the national consciousness with his searing portrayal of a man disintegrating before viewers’ eyes against a 1980s backdrop of a collapsing Merseyside economy. Of the five unemployed Liverpool tarmac-layers featured week by week, it was Hill in “Yosser’s Story” who monopolised the public’s imagination and sympathy.

Having lost his job, abandoned by his wife, and with three ragged young children in tow, Yosser scoured Liverpool looking for any kind of work, only to find himself rendered invisible, politely ignored or patronised by people and social security officials incapable of helping him. He was reduced, literally, to banging his head against walls, in one blackly comic scene that of a church confessional.

Nor, in Bleasdale’s screenplay, could Yosser even find release through suicide, being hauled out of a park lake by the police in the final scene and returned screaming to a life that promised nothing for him. When it was screened in the United States, The New York Times judged Hill’s performance “a powerful tour de force, his eyes constantly conveying Yosser’s bottomless despair and unending panic.”

Bleasdale had originally created his unemployed gang of tar-spreaders for a 1978 single BBC Play For Today, “The Black Stuff”, in which they scratched a living by moonlighting. Although the role earned Hill numerous awards it also, as he later revealed, almost “drove him to the edge of insanity”; the sociopathic Yosser came to represent the manic desperation of Britain’s unemployed, and his “Gizza job” entreaty with which he accosted startled strangers entered the nation’s consciousness, even inspiring Carnaby Street T-shirts.

A Mancunian by birth, Hill brooded deeply on the public’s obsession with Yosser and was uneasy with the character’s legacy. When Bleasdale and other principal members of the Blackstuff cast reassembled for the Radio 4 programme The Reunion in 2011, Hill was conspicuous by his absence. Yosser seemed to represent a sea-change in national perceptions of the character of the Beatles’ home city. “Britain had fallen out of love with Scousers,” noted one Liverpool historian. “The refrain had gone from ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah’ to ‘Gizza job!’ in 20 years.”

Hill, who was nominated for a best-actor Bafta and for what Alan Bleasdale described as “the great, definitive performance of his generation”, received the Press Guild Award for Achievement Of The Decade for his portrayal of Yosser.

Bernard Hill was born on December 17 1944 in Blackley, north Manchester, in impoverished circumstances. His father was a miner who had joined the Royal Navy during the war and had a diseased lung removed; during his convalescence Bernard’s mother worked in the kitchens at ICI. The family lived with his grandmother in her two-bedroomed flat and he shared a bed with his parents.

After Xaverian College in Rusholme he trained as a quantity surveyor, and although he acted with an amateur company he failed an audition for drama school and decided to train as a teacher. At college he met a part-time tutor, Mike Leigh, who encouraged him to persevere with acting. Hill enrolled at Manchester Polytechnic, where he gained a diploma in theatre in 1970.

He joined Granada’s experimental Stable Theatre, then David Scase’s Library Theatre company in Manchester, before making his television debut in 1973 in Mike Leigh’s first film, Hard Labour. He spent two years at the Liverpool Everyman, where his roles included Macbeth, and was a look-alike John Lennon in Alan Dossor’s production of John, Paul, George, Ringo... and Bert, Willy Russell’s musical which was seen by 15,000 people in six weeks before transferring to the West End, where it ran for a year and won a string of awards (Lyric, 1974) .

Hill reprised his Lennon role on television in 1985 in an Everyman special to mark the fifth anniversary of the former Beatle’s assassination.

Following Blackstuff, Hill went on to enjoy a successful career in films, appearing in three Best Picture Oscar winners, as Sgt Putnam in Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi (1982); the unfortunate Captain Smith in Titanic (1997); and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003).

He also played Pauline Collins’s husband in Shirley Valentine (1989), and in 1999 he played a prison warden in True Crime, directed by and starring Clint Eastwood.

Before being cast as King Theoden in two films of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Hill was considered for the role of the wizard Gandalf, which went to Sir Ian McKellen. While shooting The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) Hill broke his sternum and had his ear slashed open by a sword.

In 1984 he starred as the Polish Solidarity leader Lech Walesa in Tom Stoppard’s television play Squaring the Circle for Channel 4. In the television thriller Bellman And True (1987) he starred as a drink-sodden computer expert being blackmailed into taking part in a bank robbery, and the following year took the lead as the middle-aged coroner who falsifies a series of post-mortems in Peter Greenaway’s award-winning feature film Drowning By Numbers. In 2015 he was the Duke of Norfolk in Wolf Hall.

Hill was cast in several award-winning television productions, as Gratus in I, Claudius (1976); as the Duke of York in the BBC Shakespeare Henry VI trilogy and as First Murderer in Richard III (1983); and Magwitch in Great Expectations (BBC Two, 1999). On the stage he starred in the title role in Macbeth (Leicester Haymarket, 1985) and as Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard (Aldwych, 1989).

In 2010 on television he was John Darwin, the titular Canoe Man, who faked his own death with the connivance of his wife Anne (played by Saskia Reeves) in order to collect his life insurance. In the third season of Game of Thrones, transmitted in 2013, he played the proud and intimidating Lord Terrence Tymber.

Hill plays the father of Martin Freeman’s character in the Liverpool-set police drama The Responder, whose second series began last night. During filming he paid a visit to his old haunt, the Everyman Theatre. The manager said: “What are you doing here?” and asked him if he wanted to see the current show, Hill recalled. “It was Boys From The Blackstuff. I couldn’t believe it.”

Away from stage and screen, Hill was a karate expert and a keen Manchester United fan.

Bernard Hill married the actress Marianna Hill, with whom he had a son.

Bernard Hill, born December 17 1944, died May 5 2024