David Warner, who started his career on the British stage, was drawn to movies and television after playing Hamlet at the Royal Shakespeare Company at the age of 24, and has more than 200 such as “The Omen” and “Time After Time”. I have accumulated credits. “TRON,” “Titanic,” and “Wallander” died on Sunday in northwestern London. He was 80 years old.
His family said in a statement that the cause of death at the actor’s retirement home, Denville Hall, was a “cancer-related illness.”
Warner played a variety of roles, but he may have been most often equated with a villain. He was Jack the Ripper at “Time After Time” in 1979. Two years later, in “Time Bandits,” his character was simply named the Evil Genius. In the 1982 movie “Tron,” in which Jeff Bridges character Kevin Flynn was brought inside a computer, he was Flynn’s nemesis in both the real and virtual worlds.
“I have never been asked to play a happy and romantic lead,” Warner told the British newspaper The Independent in 2003. I have worked with some very beautiful women, but they don’t want to be with me. “
He didn’t care about a role like “TRON”.
“I enjoyed watching it with the audience,” he told The New York Times in 1982.
Warner has been employed for a very long time, although some actors have had relatively short successes. In the 1970s, the first decade of film and television, he collected over 20 credits. He was over 80 in the 1990s. He had a face that seemed to adapt to almost every occasion, whether his role required anonymity or complexity.
“Somehow he makes his face almost completely forgotten, like one of the thousand faces seen at a bus stop,” Vincent Canby wrote in The Times in 1968. , ”The comment is intended as a compliment. About 35 years later, Emily Young, who directed him in the 2003 drama “Kiss of Life,” basically said the opposite.
“David has such a physical presence,” she told the independent. “He seems to hold his life experience in his frame and in his face.”
It was Peter Hall, then artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, who promoted youthful Warner to a theater celebrity and cast him into several prominent roles, including the 1965 starring of “Hamlet.” It was a director. .. Warner gave an interpretation of a role that was clearly different from what theater fans were accustomed to, and critics were divided. One of his fans was Mark Gardener of Sunday Mercury in Birmingham, England.
“This violent, blinking, introverted young man hides his sorrow and anxiety under the habit of a clown hat and khaki student,” Gardner wrote.
“It’s Hamlet for this embarrassed, post-war generation, frustrated, unhappy, and uncertain,” he added.
The production was performed in the repertoire for two years. In an interview with the Times in 2001, Hall looked back on Warner’s performance.
“Most importantly, it was Hamlet who actually defined the 1960s part,” he said. “It was a young Hamlet. David’s kindness and passivity were absolutely jibe with the power of flowers and so on. He was great.”
The opportunity for that 2001 article was, surprisingly, Warner’s American stage debut at the age of 60, with the production of George Bernard Shaw’s “Major Barbara” by the Roundabout Theater Company in New York. It has also been his first stage performance of all kinds since 1972. He said he quit his stage work, partly because of his anxiety about his live performance.
“See, I’m not a theater guy,” he told the Times in 2001. It’s just started. “
Instead, Ian McKellen, Derek Jacobi, and Holm became prominent figures in the theater, but by that time Warner seems to have never encountered a movie or television role he didn’t take. It came to be known for. His resume contained a reasonably authoritative role. He won an Emmy for his performance in the 1981 miniseries “Masada”. This is about the Roman Empire’s siege of Israel’s Masada Fortress, but he also served as Prime Minister of the Klingons in “Star Trek.” “Franchise. He joked about his reputation and talked about a conversation with his old colleague Holm after wrapping a filming on the television version of “Uncle Vanya” in 1991.
“I told him,’What are you doing next?'” Warner told the Times. “And Ian, who was always making the best choice, said he was doing a Kafka movie with Jeremy Irons, and he said,” So what are you doing? “Is it?” “I’m doing what’s called” Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of Ooze. ” I said.
David Hattersley Warner was born on July 29, 1941 in Manchester, England. His parents told the Times in 1982 that he wasn’t married and “I traveled a lot all over England because I kept stealing me from each other.”
He was trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and, as he told the story, when fate came, he had an experimental troupe and a seven-line part.
“Peter Hall stopped by to see the show. That was his job. And about a year later, I was invited to audition for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and I entered. . “
At about the same time, he played his first important television role on a British television show called “Madhouse on Castle Street.” There was someone else who would soon become famous in the cast: a lesser-known American folk singer named Bob Dylan. The show aired once in early 1963, but the movie was not preserved. It is said to include one of Dylan’s early “Blowin’in the Wind” performances.
That same year, Warner landed his first major film role in “Tom Jones,” playing a (of course) unattractive character named Brifil. The title role of the comic drama “Morgan!” (1966) further solidified the good intentions of his movie.
Warner’s television productions include roles such as the 1960s mini-series “War of the Roses”, the 1970s “Holocaust”, the 1980s “Keep Backpage”, the 1990s “Chorus”, and “Belief”. Was included. In the 2000s. He played a recurring role in the 1991 series “Twin Peaks” and this century’s “Walander” and “Ripper Street”.
According to his family’s announcement, his survivors include his partner Lisa Bowerman and his son Luke.
