So sad as I just wrote about the british comedy/drama "Monarch of the Glen", one of the main talent of the show, Richard Briers, passed away today due to a long time suffering of emphysema.
Here's a bit more about Briers from The Huffington Post:
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. Broadcast in Britain between 1975 and 1978, 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," "Hamlet," "Peter's Friends" and "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein."
Branagh remembered Briers as "a national treasure, a great actor and a wonderful man. He was greatly loved and he will be deeply missed."
