R.I.P. Richard Briers, British actor of The Good Life

Richard Briers—the British comic actor best known for the sitcom The Good Life and hus appearances in eight Kenneth Branagh films—died Sunday at age 79, after years of smoking-related ailments.
Born in London, Briers was interested in acting from childhood, an ambition fostered by his pianist mother as well as his father’s cousin, the successful comedian Terry-Thomas. After menial jobs as a filing clerk and a stint in the RAF, he studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in the mid-1950s alongside classmates Albert Finney and Peter O’Toole, winning early praise for his performance in the title role in Hamlet. He enjoyed a busy career ever afterwards on stage, TV and film, earning fame for his good-natured and genial comic roles, but also proving himself adept at darker, dramatic characters like King Lear and Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya.
Briers' first TV starring roles came in the mid-1960s with Brothers In Law and Marriage Lines; by far his biggest success was the 1975-78 sitcom The Good Life, also known in America as Good Neighbors. Briers starred as the boyish, doggedly optimistic Tom Good, a bored graphic designer who, following an epiphany on his 40th birthday, convinces his wife Barbara (the charming Felicity Kendal) to embrace a self-sufficient, back-to-the-earth lifestyle by turning their suburban homestead into a working farm, much to the chagrin of his more conventional best friends and neighbors (played by Penelope Keith and Paul Eddington). The show was a huge hit in England and a mainstay of PBS stations in the U.S., becoming such a British institution that its final episode was recorded in front of Queen Elizabeth.