Sean Bean is an English actor best known for playing Boromir, the noble but tragically flawed son of Gondor’s steward, in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, whose death defending Merry and Pippin remains one of the trilogy’s most emotionally powerful sequences despite his character’s single-film run.
Bean has built a long career playing morally complex and often doomed characters, most notably Ned Stark in the first season of HBO’s Game of Thrones, whose shocking death became one of television’s most talked-about moments. He played villain Alec Trevelyan, agent 006, opposite Pierce Brosnan’s James Bond in GoldenEye, and the treasure-hunting antagonist Ian Howe in National Treasure. Bean also led six series of the ITV historical drama Sharpe as Richard Sharpe, and more recently starred in the acclaimed BBC prison drama Time.
Known affectionately by fans for his frequent on-screen deaths across his career, a running joke he has embraced with good humour, Bean’s combination of one of fantasy cinema’s most poignant early trilogy moments and decades of memorable villain and anti-hero work has made him one of the most consistently popular and widely recognised British actors among collectors.