Ward was a car dealer’s son who gave moviegoers an enduring image of Winston Churchill as a callow aristocrat,and played the British bulldog in Richard Attenborough’s 1972 film, “Young Winston."

He joined the National Youth Theater at 13 and later trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where he met and shared a room with Mr. Hopkins, who became a friend. His big break came in 1967, when he had the lead role in Joe Orton’s play Loot.

Mr. Ward’s piercing good looks and archetypical Englishness made him Hollywood’s go-to British actor for a time, the Hugh Grant of the early ’70s. Following the success of “Young Winston,” in which the previously little-known Mr. Ward played opposite Anthony Hopkins and Anne Bancroft, he was cast in leading roles in “Hitler: The Last Ten Days” (1973), with Alec Guinness, and “The Three Musketeers” (1973), as the dashing but doomed Duke of Buckingham, opposite Charlton Heston, Oliver Reed and Faye Dunaway.

He performed on Broadway in A Meeting by the River.

Source: The New York Times