Osborne Hamley

Osborne is the elder son of Squire Hamley, raised as the family's great hope: clever, poetic, Cambridge-educated, and adored by his father for the brilliant future everyone assumes awaits him. He is charming and a little vain, more at ease with verse than with the farm, and increasingly evasive about how his life away from home is really going.

Tom Hollander gives Osborne a lovely, slightly wounded fragility beneath the golden-boy surface, so his charm never feels smug, only anxious. The writing sets him up as everyone's favourite and then quietly complicates that faith, letting Hollander play disappointment, evasion and tenderness in the same breath without ever tipping into melodrama.