Sean Bean

His breakthrough was a soldier with a Yorkshire accent. Sharpe ran on ITV from 1993, and Bean played the rough-edged Richard Sharpe without dropping his regional voice the way British actors usually do. The show sold globally and turned him into something unusual: an international heartthrob from a Sheffield council estate. The film career followed. He played the Bond villain in GoldenEye, died memorably in The Lord of the Rings, and then got beheaded as Ned Stark in the first season of Game of Thrones. That execution scene rewrote expectations for prestige TV drama. The dying thing had been building for years by then.

The meme ate the man. Bean has died on screen more than two dozen times, and the accumulation turned it into his dominant public identity. He's addressed it directly, said he'd 'rather play a juicy character who dies than a mundane one who lives,' and reportedly started turning down scripts that killed him off. The work kept coming anyway. Snowpiercer cast him as the eccentric antagonist Mr. Wilford across three seasons. Shardlake cast him as Thomas Cromwell in 2024. The reputation follows him everywhere, but directors keep calling.

Bean was married five times. The first was his school sweetheart when he was 21. The fifth is Ashley Moore, whom he married in 2017. In between came two more actresses, and his fourth marriage ended badly enough that police showed up to his home multiple times. He's kept the Sheffield United loyalty and the Yorkshire accent through all of it, which says something about a man who could have reinvented himself at any point.