Brian Blessed at 90: Emma Thompson, Brian May and More Pay Tribute

Brian Blessed turns 90, and the actors, musicians and mountaineers who worked with him across six decades have marked the birthday with a collection of tributes spanning Shepperton soundstages, Everest base camp and the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Emma Thompson, who appeared alongside Blessed in Kenneth Branagh's 1989 film Henry V, opened her tribute with a story from the Shepperton shoot. Visiting Blessed's dressing room in her off-the-shoulder costume for the Princess of France, she found all the windows open in freezing weather. After listening to an Everest story until her jaw froze, she was bundled into the heated corridors.

"Thompson, why are you wearing blue lipstick?" Blessed asked her. "The cold is good for you!" he thundered. Thompson wrote that she took a cold shower every day after that, and credits Blessed with starting the cold-health trend "years before Wim Hof was doing his motivational speaking".

She added: "The man is a legend: a force, a mighty wind and a great tree of life. He has the soul of a mountain-top."

Where did the career begin?

Derek Jacobi first worked with Blessed at Birmingham Rep in 1960, when the company staged a different play every month. "It was my first job and he was the star of the show," Jacobi wrote. "I was in awe of him." Sharing a dressing room with the then-twenty-something Blessed was "an education in itself". The pair reunited on the television series I, Claudius, in which Jacobi says Blessed "was marvellous as Augustus". Jacobi's birthday message: "Get to 100 and we'll all be there applauding! We're all applauding at 90 too!"

Dexter Fletcher met Blessed in the 1984 RSC season at Stratford-upon-Avon, appearing with him in Henry V — Branagh as Young Hal, Blessed as the Duke of Exeter — and in Hamlet, with Blessed as Claudius and Virginia McKenna as Gertrude. Fletcher was 18 and, he writes, constantly startled: "Wow, he just says anything!"

Blessed also shaped Fletcher's career. When the young actor hesitated between the RSC's Barbican transfer and a film role opposite Al Pacino in Revolution, Blessed took him aside. "Listen, Dexter, go and do the movie because the movie world is small and when you get into it, if you make a success of it, you're in and it's a great living," Blessed told him. Fletcher writes: "I have a great love and affection for him because he did me a huge favour by shoving me in that direction."

What was Flash Gordon like?

Melody Anderson, who played Dale Arden opposite Blessed's Prince Vultan in the 1980 film, described a tough shoot — six days a week, 12 hours a day — lightened by his humour. "Brian did not have to stretch to create a character because that's him. He is a Hawkman!" she wrote.

During one scene, as Blessed spun her around on a table, he pinched her bottom. "As an actor, I loved it because it solicited such an honest response," Anderson said. "It was exactly right for the character." Director Mike Hodges, she adds, was thrilled. At conventions with Sam J Jones, who played Flash, she and Jones would sit back and let it be "the Brian show". "It's not an ego thing: it's a life force," she wrote.

Brian May never met Blessed on set, but while Queen recorded the Flash Gordon soundtrack, May assembled the soundtrack album from dialogue, effects and music. "He's a musical part of what we achieved, like an extra member of Queen," May wrote. Blessed later appeared in Queen's Badger Badger Badger video, shouting "Keep the badgers alive!" May recalls him speaking "movingly about the way we don't accommodate wild animals in the world we've built".

Did he really climb Everest?

Mountaineer Alan Hinkes climbed with Blessed on Everest 30 years ago; Blessed reached 7,700 metres before turning back. In the base-camp mess tent, Blessed's tales would leave Hinkes "rolling off my stool on to the floor which was probably -15C". Hinkes spent two-and-a-half months with him and reports: "He didn't seem to conk out." At charity events, Blessed claims Hinkes carried him down the mountain on his back. "I couldn't really carry him down on my back, but it's a good story," Hinkes said. "He's a great raconteur."

What do his stage colleagues remember?

Imogen Stubbs worked with Blessed in The Relapse at the National Theatre in 2001, recalling him "running around on stage with a blunderbuss and his signature booming voice that creates its own weather system" — while backstage he was "disarmingly quiet and contemplative at times".

Adrian Lester, who has stood opposite him in a scene, warns against reading Blessed's bombast as mere performance. "Brian brings to his characters a charisma and charm that isn't larger than life. It is large and full to the brim with life," Lester wrote. He cites the still-quoted Flash Gordon intonation "Gordon's alive?!" and the Arctic tale: Blessed "punched a polar bear on the nose and somehow you know it's true". Lester's verdict: "A rare, brilliant, kind-hearted giant of a man. I wish there were more like him."

With Jacobi already urging him toward 100, the tributes make clear Blessed's collaborators expect — and intend to applaud — at least another decade of him.