IT'S a long way from the Old Vic to The Pet Shop Boys, but Joss Ackland, who died earlier this week at the age of 95, made the journey seem like the easiest and most natural thing in the world.
A familiar face to TV viewers and movie-lovers for more than five decades, he rarely played the leading man – but that lugubrious and well lived-in face graced any number of fine productions down the decades.
A self-confessed workaholic, Ackland was a stage veteran who also ventured successfully into the world of film and TV, clocking up more than 130 screen credits in a career that stretched all the way up to Katherine of Alexandria in 2014, completed when he was a mere 86-years old.
For some, he'll be remembered as a supporting star in Hollywood blockbusters like Lethal Weapon 2 and The Hunt For Red October, bringing an English gravitas to usually villainous roles in American productions and making the likes of Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey just a little more appealing simply by being there on screen, no matter how little time he was actually afforded in the final cut.
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For others, and I include myself here, he was simply a superb character actor, who lit up innumerable British B-movies, fantasy flicks and gritty TV crime capers.
Seeing that long, hang-dog face crop up in an occasional episode of The Sweeney, usually as one of the bad lads, or playing a brusque army major type in something like The Avengers or The Persuaders, was like welcoming an old friend into your living room.
He could do the serious stuff too, of course. His turn as Jerry Westerby, a sports journalist and occasional seller of State secrets in the timeless Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, is both urbane and seedy in equal measure.
Ackland had memorable roles in a couple of less-appreciated Hammer films in the 60s, Crescendo and Rasputin The Mad Monk, had his head lopped off in the Amicus portmanteau classic The House That Dripped Blood, and even turned up as a murderous priest in It Couldn't Happen Here in 1988.
That very odd cinematic offering from pop duo The Pet Shop Boys may seem like an unlikely production for an actor of Ackland's standing, but by his own admission, if work was offered, whatever its nature, he tended to take it – and his later reasoning that he did it because his grandchildren liked the band's music only makes me like the man more, frankly.
For me, though, his greatest big screen role came in Villain, a wildly exciting and still oddly undervalued British gangster film from 1971. Director Michael Tuchner's grimy tale of East End gangland figure Vic Dakin may be a vehicle for the great Richard Burton to flex his muscles in a thinly-veiled study of The Krays, but Ackland's role as his criminal associate Edgar Lowis is equally unforgettable.
A sickly, snivelling hoodlum, who tries to double-cross his gangland boss with predictably disastrous results, it's a role that allowed Ackland to stretch out and show us all what a mighty fine actor he really was.
