Lennard Pearce

He may have found household name status thanks to playing Del and Rodney's doddering Grandad, but Lennard Pearce actually had an illustrious acting career going back decades.

After training at RADA, he found himself a sought-after stage actor during the 1960s, appearing in a long-running production of My Fair Lady and joining the Royal Shakespeare Company (where he worked alongside such giants of the theatre world as Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud). He was also in the seminal Ken Loach TV drama Cathy Come Home, which shocked Britain in 1966 with its depiction of unemployment and homelessness.