Sir Michael Hordern signed postcard

He made more than a hundred and sixty film appearances, usually in character roles, including Passport to Pimlico (1949), Scrooge (1951, as Jacob Marley; he was to play Ebenezer Scrooge himself in a 1977 TV adaptation), The Heart of the Matter (1953), Grand National Night (1953),The Spanish Gardener (1956), Sink the Bismarck! (1960), El Cid (1961), Cleopatra (1963), The V.I.P.s (1963), The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965), Khartoum (1966), A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966), The Taming of the Shrew (1967), Where Eagles Dare (1969), Anne of the Thousand Days (1969), England Made Me (1972), Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1972), Juggernaut (1974), The Slipper and the Rose (1976), Shogun (1980), Gandhi (1982). In 1968 he appeared as the central character in Jonathan Miller's television adaptation of M. R. James' ghost story, Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad and, perhaps coincidentally, some years later narrated nineteen unabridged supernatural stories by M. R. James, released across four audio cassette collections by Argo Records in the 1980s. In 1986, he appeared in the TV series Paradise Postponed. In 1992 Hordern narrated the two-cassette recording of the John Mortimer story Rumpole on Trial.

Hordern was also in demand for other voice-over work. As the narrator of FilmFair Production's Paddington, and as the voice of Badger in the 1980s TV series The Wind in the Willows, Hordern is familiar to TV audiences everywhere. He also provided the ironic voice-over narration in Stanley Kubrick's film Barry Lyndon, and can be heard playing the part of the rabbits' god Frith in Martin Rosen's 1978 animated adaptation of Richard Adams' Watership Down

. On radio he played Gandalf in the BBC's radio adaptation of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings (1981); another great wizard, Merlin, in an adaptation of T. H. White's The Sword in the Stone (1982); and P. G. Wodehouse's famous indefatigable valet (or gentleman's gentleman) Jeeves in several series in the 1970s.

Hordern's abridged 1991 recording of C. S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia remains a classic recording of the series.