He graduated from RADA in 1983 having won the Silver Medal for his performance in Waiting for Godot. He made his professional acting début in 1983 at the Watermill Theatre in Newbury, Berkshire as Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet. His early work involved a mixture of stage and screen work. His first national exposure came in an advert for non-alcoholic lager. Between 1986 and 1988 he toured the country Read more...

However it was the character Richard Sharpe that he would become most associated with. Bean was the first choice to play Sharpe, but was unavailable; so the part went to Paul McGann. Two days into filming, however, McGann was injured in a football match, and, although the producers initially tried to work around his injury, eventually he was replaced with Bean, who was by then available. The 14-episode Read more...

His first notable Hollywood appearance was as an Irish republican terrorist in the 1992 film adaptation of Patriot Games.

This would be the first of several villains that he would portray. He became Alec Trevelyan (MI6's 006), the major villain of the 1995 James Bond film GoldenEye, as the character Spence (with Robert de Niro) in Ronin (1998), a wife-beating ex-con in Essex Boys (2000), the Read more...