An alumnus of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Bradley is also an established stage actor, with a career that includes a Laurence Olivier Award for his role in a production of King Lear and appearing in the Harold Pinter play No Man's Land at the Duke of York's Theatre in the West End.

Upon leaving school, he completed a five-year apprenticeship with the optical instruments maker Cooke, Troughton & Simms and remained with the firm until 1966, when he moved to London to train as an actor at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

In 1998, he appeared in the BBC adaptation of Vanity Fair as the miserly Sir Pitt Crawley, and Our Mutual Friend as the villainous Rogue Riderhood.

Other television appearances include the 2001 series The Way We Live Now, directed by David Yates, who would work with Bradley five years later on the Harry Potter films.

[5] That same year he appeared as Spooner in a production of Harold Pinter's No Man's Land at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, which later transferred to London's West End.

[12] It was announced in January 2013, that Bradley had been cast as actor William Hartnell in An Adventure in Space and Time, a BBC docudrama about the creation of Doctor Who in 1963.

[13] In 2013, he also appeared in The World's End, a follow-up to Hot Fuzz in the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy, this time portraying "Mad" Basil, an eccentric local man from the fictional English town Newton Haven.

From 2014, Bradley played a leading role as Professor Abraham Setrakian, a Holocaust survivor turned vampire hunter in Guillermo del Toro's TV series The Strain.

[15] In 2017, Bradley joined the cast of Guillermo del Toro's animated Netflix series Trollhunters: Tales of Arcadia playing the role of Merlin.

In 2021, it was announced that Bradley would be joining the cast of Allelujah, a film adaptation of Alan Bennett's play of the same name directed by Richard Eyre, which will star Jennifer Saunders, Bally Gill, Russell Tovey, Derek Jacobi, and Judi Dench.

His eldest son, George, is an architect, who has featured on the ITV series Love Your Home and Garden alongside Alan Titchmarsh.