His death was announced by his family. No cause was given, though Mr. Ward had been receiving medical treatment since May 2011, when illness forced him to drop out of rehearsals for a London stage production of Shaw's "Pygmalion."

Mr. Ward's piercing good looks and archetypical Englishness made him Hollywood's go-to British actor for a time, the Hugh Grant of the early '70s. Following the success of "Young Winston," in which the previously little-known Mr. Ward played opposite Anthony Hopkins and Anne Bancroft, he was cast in leading roles in "Hitler: The Last Ten Days" (1973), with Alec Guinness, and "The Three Musketeers" (1973), as the dashing but doomed Duke of Buckingham, opposite Charlton Heston, Oliver Reed and Faye Dunaway.

In 1975, he starred with Mr. Hopkins again in "All Creatures Great and Small," a television movie based on the writing of the veterinarian James Herriot. Recently, he played Bishop Stephen Gardiner in the BBC historical fiction series The Tudors (seen in the United States on Showtime).

A mixture of earnest ingenuousness and wry, self-deprecating humor characterized Mr. Ward's remarks in the dozens of interviews he gave over the years, and "Young Winston" was far and away the movie he was asked about the most. In a 2002 interview, he described the fine line he tried to walk in preparing for the role:

"I did an awful lot of research for the part," he said, "and they used to run old newsreels in the mornings after I'd been in makeup. It was always of 'old Winston,' obviously, but I think I learned an awful lot from them, which helped. We didn't want an imitation, and I didn't want to be thought of as thinking I was him. Neither did I want to be regarded as an expert. But when I was doing the publicity tour for the film, that's what naturally happened. Everybody seemed to want to talk about Dresden."

Before being cast to play his country's greatest modern leader — during Churchill's daring adventures in the Boer War and in the Sudan, and before he became a politician — Mr. Ward had been cast in only two films, both of them horror movies. He played an unethical pharmacist in one and a serial killer in the other. But he described the experience as great training, especially for the opportunity to work with the British horror star Peter Cushing, who gave the young, self-described self-serious actor excellent advice about the trade:

"Our first scene was rather argumentative — we were coming in rather smartly with lines, shouting at each other," Mr. Ward said. During a break, he recalled, Mr. Cushing came over and said in a kindly whisper. " 'Now you do know, dear boy, that at the end of every line, leave a very tiny gap so they can get the scissors in.' " If not for that, he said, "I wouldn't have known anything about them having to cut and splice the film."

Simon Ward was born on Oct. 19, 1941, to a working-class family in Beckenham, Kent. His father sold cars at a local dealership. He joined the National Youth Theater at 13 and later trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where he met and shared a room with Mr. Hopkins, who became a friend. His big break came in 1967, when he had the lead role in Joe Orton's play "Loot."

He is survived by his wife, Alexandra, and their three daughters: Claudia Ward, the actress Sophie Ward and Kitty McIntyre, who is married to the British comedian Michael McIntyre.

In interviews, Mr. Ward made frequent references to his lifelong lack of ambition. "I've never desperately wanted anything — neither fame nor riches," he said. A drama teacher, he said, once told him he needed to decide what he really wanted as an actor, because "until you do, you will always be a bloody awful actor." And, Mr. Ward added, "There's a terrible truth in that."

Friends said he was bitterly disappointed at having to drop out of "Pygmalion" last year, because it was one the first times in his career that instead of playing a typical aristocrat, he was to play a typical (if caricatured) working-class man. He was cast as Eliza Doolittle's father, Alfred.