Andrews was born in
London, the son of Geraldine Agnes (née Cooper), a dancer, and Stanley Thomas Andrews, an arranger and conductor for the
BBC. He attended the
Royal Masonic School for Boys in
Bushey,
Hertfordshire. After a series of jobs that included catering, farming and journalism, he secured a position at the
Chichester Theatre, where he worked as an assistant stage manager and later as a stand-in producer. In 1968, he auditioned for a production of
Alan Bennett's play
Forty Years On, which featured
John Gielgud as the headmaster of a
British public school during the
World War I period. Andrews was cast as Skinner, one of 20 schoolboys. In 1974, he played Lord Robert, Marquis of Stockbridge, in the TV series
Upstairs, Downstairs. In 1975, he had a leading role in the Spanish film
Las adolescentes (
The Adolescents), opposite
Koo Stark. In June 1977, Andrews was cast as
Bodie in the
ITV series
The Professionals, but after three days of filming, the creator and producer
Brian Clemens believed the chemistry between Andrews and
Martin Shaw (
Doyle) did not work and that "the pair did not have the required undercurrent of menace to carry off the concept".
Lewis Collins replaced Andrews. In 1979, Andrews was the main star of the ITV television series
Danger UXB, playing a bomb disposal officer in the
London Blitz. At the
National Theatre in London, he appeared in
Coming in to Land (1986/1987) by
Stephen Poliakoff, alongside
Dame Maggie Smith. He also played Henry Higgins in a stage version of
My Fair Lady (2003) and Count Fosco in
Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Woman in White (2005). Andrews narrated a 21st-anniversary BBC Radio 2 special broadcast of
Cameron Mackintosh's musical
Les Misérables, sung by the then
West End cast at the
Mermaid Theatre in
London on Sunday 8 October 2006. He appeared as Prime Minister
Stanley Baldwin in the film ''
The King's Speech'' (2010), for which he and his castmates won a 2011
Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture. ==Personal life==