David Warner RIP
DAVID Warner, who passed away earlier this week at the age of 80, never gave a bad big screen performance.
If that claim sounds a tad unlikely given that we're talking about a career stretching back over more than 200 films, just consider the facts: this is an actor who appeared in everything from Titanic to Time Bandits, The Thirty Nine Steps to Mary Poppins Returns and always gave his best. There aren't many you can honestly say that about.
He was also phenomenally versatile. A large, lugubrious figure with an appealing air of slightly aloof world-weariness, Warner was the consummate screen villain – but he could turn his hand to just about everything from the broad comedy of something like The Man With Two Brains to the big budget chills of The Omen, where he famously 'lost his head' in a sequence that traumatised me as a wide-eyed youth back in the day.
That turn as Jennings, the doomed photojournalist in Richard Donner's 1976 tale of demonic child possession, is perfectly judged. Believable and slightly cynical, his performance adds a touch of reality to the fantasy and is simply unforgettable. It was probably just another day at the office for Warner. Whatever the production, he could elevate it just by being there.
An actor who clearly liked to work, he rarely left our screens for decades and was occasionally employed in material that didn't really deserve his RSC-trained sense of gravitas and special presence, yet his performance never failed to impress. He was always good, regardless of the projects his industry sometimes handed him.
For a generation of theatre lovers, his youthful Hamlet for the RSC in 1965 was what first brought him to prominence, but for cinema lovers it was his casting in Karel Reisz's blackly comic tale of mental collapse Morgan, A Suitable Case For Treatment the following year that marked him out as a true star.
Great and effortlessly cool as the young Warner is in that one, for the purposes of this tribute I'd point you in the direction of some of his other films. There's his work for Sam Peckinpah to consider for starters. He played a preacher in The Ballad Of Cable Hogue, a village idiot in Straw Dogs and a German officer in the mighty Cross Of Iron for the great director. It is as fine a trilogy of films as any actor could ever hope to grace, and for David Warner it's just three more stellar performances from a career littered with them.
Personally, I love the man's turn in the 1973 horror anthology From Beyond the Grave. Playing a neckerchief wearing London hipster who cheats Peter Cushing's old antique shop owner out of a few quid when he purchases a vintage mirror from his creepy little back street emporium and is swiftly punished for his cheapness, it's the kind of role that allowed Warner to show off the full range of his on-screen skills.
Moody and mean spirited, but with a smirk rarely far from that unforgettable face it's everything that made the man one of the finest screen actors ever.
