Timothy Dalton was born on 21 March 1946 in Colwyn Bay, North Wales, the son of an English advertising executive and former Special Operations Executive officer, Peter Dalton Leggett, and his American wife, Dorothy Scholes. Before Dalton's fourth birthday the family moved to Belper in Derbyshire, England, where he was raised and educated at Herbert Strutt Grammar School.
He decided to become an actor after seeing a production of Macbeth at 16, and trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art before leaving in 1966, without completing the course, to join the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. His film debut came in 1968 as Philip II of France in The Lion in Winter, alongside Peter O'Toole and Katharine Hepburn, and he went on to star as Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights (1970) and Lord Darnley in Mary, Queen of Scots (1971).
Dalton became the fourth actor to play James Bond, starring in The Living Daylights (1987) and Licence to Kill (1989), bringing a harder-edged, more literary interpretation of Ian Fleming's character to the screen after the lighter tone of the Roger Moore years.
His long career has also included Mr Rochester in the BBC's Jane Eyre (1983), Prince Barin in Flash Gordon (1980), Rhett Butler in the television mini-series Scarlett (1994), Simon Skinner in the comedy Hot Fuzz (2007), and Sir Malcolm Murray across three seasons of the Showtime series Penny Dreadful (2014-2016).