Peter Ustinov

1921–2004 · British actor, playwright and writer

Biography

Peter Ustinov (London, 1921 - Genolier, Switzerland, 2004) was a British actor, playwright and writer who became one of the best-known entertainers of the second half of the twentieth century. Beyond acting, he worked as a screenwriter, director, producer, opera director and comic raconteur, and his range across so many fields earned him the reputation of a Renaissance man. He won two Academy Awards for Best Supporting Actor.

Born into a family of Russian, German and French background, Ustinov was the son of a journalist who, by some accounts, worked with British intelligence before the war. He was educated at Westminster School and trained at the London Theatre Studio, making his first stage appearance in 1938. During the Second World War he served as a private in the British Army and, for a time, acted as batman to David Niven, with whom he later worked on the script of The Way Ahead. His first film appearance came in the propaganda picture One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942), in which he had to deliver lines in English, Latin and Dutch.

After the war he established himself as a dramatist with The Love of Four Colonels (1951), and his screen career took off with Quo Vadis (1951), where he played the emperor Nero. Films such as Sinuhé the Egyptian and We're No Angels, both directed by Michael Curtiz, followed, the latter opposite Humphrey Bogart. His international breakthrough came with Spartacus (1960), directed by Stanley Kubrick, which won him his first Oscar, and Topkapi (1964), which brought a second. His performances often relied on characters who seemed clumsy, ingratiating or timid but who could bring humour to a drama. His portrayals of Agatha Christie's detective Hercule Poirot in several adaptations are perhaps the roles most readily associated with him today. As writer and director he adapted the Broadway play Billy Budd, by Louis O. Coxe and Robert H. Chapman, which he also directed and starred in as a film in 1962.

In the theatre and in opera he was a respected director; during the 1960s he staged several operas, including Mozart's The Magic Flute, and he wrote comedies with a cosmopolitan wit as well as his memoir Dear Me (1977). He had a long attachment to Mallorca, where he spent summers at Formentor for decades. In 1968 he became the first rector of the University of Dundee, and later served as chancellor of Durham University.

From the late 1960s his work as a goodwill ambassador for UNICEF took up much of his time, and in 1990 he was made a Knight Bachelor. He served as president of the World Federalist Movement from 1991 until his death. After the film The Oil of Life in 1992 he largely withdrew from cinema, and in his final years he concentrated on lectures and talk-show appearances. His legacy combines comic and dramatic work with a long record of public criticism of prejudice, social hypocrisy and nationalism. He died in 2004 at a clinic in Genolier, eighteen days short of his 83rd birthday.