Obituary: Lord of the Rings, Titanic and Boys from the Blackstuff actor Bernard Hill

Yosser personified what it meant to be out of work and out of luck in Liverpool at that time and his oft-repeated phrase, “gizza job”, often followed by a head butt, became part of the national discourse.

“I was desperate to work with him,” Bleasdale recalled of Hill’s casting. “Everything he did - his whole procedure for working, the manner in which he worked and his performance was everything that you could ever wish for.”

Yet unlike the character he embodied, Bernard Hill was not a Liverpudlian. He was born in Manchester and lived in Suffolk. Brought up in a Catholic family of miners, he attended Xaverian College and then Manchester Polytechnic School of Drama at the same time as Richard Griffiths, graduating in 1970.

Boys from the Blackstuff was his first major TV work. It began with a single BBC play, The Black Stuff, whose subjects were a group of Liverpool tarmac layers on a job near Middlesbrough. It was filmed in 1978 but not transmitted until January 1980, to hugely positive reviews. The series was commissioned soon afterwards.

His performance as Yosser earned Hill a Bafta TV nomination in 1983, the same year the show picked up the Bafta for best drama series.

He had previously been glimpsed on the small screen in such series as I, Claudius (as Gratus), Telford’s Change and opposite Peter Vaughan in Thames TV’s crime series, Fox. He had also scored roles in the films Trial by Combat, The Sailor’s Return and The Spongers.

But after Blackstuff his career trajectory increased significantly. He appeared as Sergeant Putnam in Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi and in Roger Donaldson’s The Bounty, a fourth dramatisation of the mutiny on HMS Bounty.

In 1985 he had the lead in a TV dramatisation of John Lennon’s life, A Journey in the Life and appeared on stage in The Cherry Orchard, Macbeth and Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge.

He also appeared in Willy Russell’s 1989 hit Shirley Valentine as Joe Bradshaw, husband of a Liverpool housewife (Pauline Collins) who engages in an extramarital affair.

Hill went on to play Captain Smith in the Oscar-winning 1997 epic romance Titanic, which starred Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. He joined the Lord Of The Rings cast for the second film in the trilogy, 2002’s The Two Towers, which won two Academy Awards for best sound editing and best visual effects.

He returned to the franchise for 2003’s The Return Of The King, which picked up 11 Oscars, including best picture and best director for Sir Peter Jackson.

In the 2015 BBC adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s novel Wolf Hall, about the court of Henry VIII, he played the Duke of Norfolk, uncle to Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard.

His last role was as the father of Martin Freeman’s character in the second series of the current BBC crime drama, The Responder.

Hill did not marry and is survived by his son and daughter.