Richard Briers

LONDON (AP) - British actor Richard Briers, an avuncular comic presence on TV and movie screens for decades, has died at the age of 79.

Briers' agent, Christopher Farrar, said the actor died at his London home on Sunday. A former heavy smoker, he had suffered from emphysema.

Briers starred in the 1970s sitcom "The Good Life" as Tom Good, a man who decides to quit the urban rat race for a life of self-sufficiency in suburbia.

The show, which contrasted the back-to-the land Goods with their conventional neighbors the Leadbetters, made stars of its core cast - Briers, Felicity Kendal, Penelope Keith and Paul Eddington - and is regularly voted one of the greatest British sitcoms of all time. It aired in the U.S. as "Good Neighbors."

Briars also starred in the comedy-drama "Ever-Decreasing Circles," the Scottish Highlands drama "Monarch of the Glen" and a host of other shows.

In later life he became well-known for Shakespearean roles. He joined director Kenneth Branagh's Renaissance Theatre Company in 1987 after deciding, he said, that "I had gone as far as I could doing sitcoms."

For Branagh he took on roles including King Lear, Malvolio in "Twelfth Night" and the buffoon Bottom in "A Midsummer Night's Dream."

He also appeared in several Branagh-directed films, including "Henry V," ''A Midsummer Night's Dream," ''Peter's Friends" and "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein."

Other movie roles included the voice of rabbit Fiver in the much-loved animated animal feature "Watership Down."

On stage, Briers was associated with the work of British comic playwright Alan Ayckbourn, playing leading roles in "Relatively Speaking," ''Absurd Person Singular" and "Absent Friends."

Born Jan. 14, 1934, Briers trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and worked consistently in theater, film and television for more than half a century.

His latest film credit is in the recently relea sed "Cockneys Vs. Zombies."

He said he had no desire to retire, but complained in one of his final interviews that the chronic lung disease emphysema was slowing him down.

"It's totally my fault. So, I get very breathless, which is a pain in the backside," he told the Daily Mail newspaper last month. "Trying to get upstairs... oh God, it's ridiculous. Of course, when you're bloody nearly 80 it's depressing, because you've had it anyway."

In 1989, Briers was named an Officer of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II for services to the arts.

Briers married the actress Anne Davies in 1956. They had two daughters.

JILL LAWLESS, Associated Press


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