Peter UstinovSo joyous and immense were the hopes that once rested on the actor, raconteur and humanitarian, Sir Peter Ustinov, who has died in Switzerland at 82, that the final balance-sheet of his life was bound to seem an anticlimax, both to himself and to those who saw the skyrocket of his early talent.
To his contemporary Richard Attenborough, and to many others, "There was no doubt that he was the genius of our generation. We regarded his potential to be as great as Chekhov or Shaw." But, Attenborough added when Ustinov was nearly 70, "he hasn't yet written what he is capable of". He never did, and he knew it. He had to be content with the immense joy that he did give, apparently effortlessly, with being the most consistently funny raconteur of his time.
His mother was convinced he would be a great creative genius. By the standards he set himself, those of the old European high culture of his mixed ancestry, he fell depressingly short. His genius turned out to be mainly for life-enhancement.
His London stage debut at 18 is still a legend. He had West End audiences and the leading critics of the day convulsed with laughter at a brief revue sketch. One of his later party pieces was to imitate every orchestral instrument in Beethoven's Eroica symphony.
His early impact as a comic performer was comparable to that of Peter Cook, John Cleese and Rowan Atkinson; but Ustinov also proved to be a playwright of substance, a film director, a novelist, a heavyweight newspaper columnist and an Academy Award-winning actor.
His conviviality and breadth of interests gave him access to most of the world's VIPs. Close friends ranged from Mikhail Gorbachev to Yehudi Menuhin. He published more than 20 books and harvested countless awards and honorary degrees.
He remained haunted by his father's remark about his literary debut: "It is not even drama, it is vaudeville." But he came as close to genius as any humorist in his time. Late in life he kept calling himself a failure, while sounding remarkably comfortable about it. "There was only one saving grace," he wrote in his autobiography Dear Me (1977), which sold a million copies, "and that was that I was irrevocably betrothed to laughter, the sound of which has always seemed to me the most civilised music in the universe."
His father was Jona "Klop" Ustinov, an opportunistic journalist, half-Russian, half-German, "the best raconteur I have ever met", according to Dame Rebecca West. Klop, whose nickname meant "Bedbug", was remembered chiefly for running a German news agency in London after the second World War.
But in 1999 a study based on MI5 files disclosed that, as a press officer to the German embassy, he worked for British intelligence before the war. He warned the government seven months in advance of Hitler's intention to invade Czechoslovakia and reported on his scathing attitude to Neville Chamberlain.The latter's combined anxiety and rage over this "contributed materially" to his introduction of military call-up early in 1939, the study claims.
Peter's mother was the painter and ballet designer Nadia Benois, of Russian, French and Italian blood. Her uncle was the theatrical art director, painter and librettist Alexander Benois, co-founder of the magazine Mir Iskusstva (The World Of Art), out of which sprang Diaghilev's Ballets Russes.
Ustinov was born in Swiss Cottage, London, an almost perfectly spherical 12lb baby and only child, descended as he later said "from generations of rotund men." He was, his family says, reading at eight months and impersonating Lloyd George by the age of two.
He "learned how to survive" at school by "emphasising the clumsy and comic aspects of my character", a ploy that became lifelong. His poor maths and science prompted him, however, to leave Westminster School without taking exams. But he had already earned his first writing income from London Evening Standard. And he was starting to write plays.
His mother got him into the London Theatre Studio, an acting school run by her friend, the director Michel St Denis. The actor Dirk Bogarde, who shared a dressing room with him, remembered "a rough-haired, scatty boy, blindingly ambitious, streets ahead of anything I'd ever come across . . . He scared the shit out of me."
St Denis diagnosed "a dangerous facility which would need counteracting with discipline", a complaint drama critics were to make all Ustinov's life. In 1939 his flair burst out in two sketches in a revue at the Players' Theatre in London. One, spoken mainly in invented Swahili, satirised a talk he had heard at school by a cleric on "Christian soldiers in the heart of darkest Africa".
The second was a monologue by Madame Liselotte Beethoven-Fink, an imaginary, Austro-German lieder singer, "grimly mustering the remains of a charm that never existed", as James Agate, the most influential theatre critic of his time, wrote.
A friend sent Agate Ustinov's first play, House Of Regrets (1940), a tragicomedy about Russian émigrés not unlike his own family. The critic announced in the Sunday Times: "A new dramatist has arrived." By 1942 he had two plays running in the West End, House Of Regrets, and his comedy, Blow Your Trumpet, a flop.
Private Ustinov was then serving rather insubordinately in the Royal Sussex Regiment. After six awkward months a transfer to the Army Kinematograph Service enabled him to work as an apprentice scriptwriter on two of Carol Reed's films and to direct his first film, School For Secrets (1946), about the invention of radar.
In 1944 his play The Banbury Nose, the story of an English upper-class family written backwards in time, led Agate to compare him to Coward and hail him as "the greatest master of stagecraft now writing in this country." In 1946 he played the detective, twice his own age, opposite John Gielgud in a legendary stage version of Dostoevsky's Crime And Punishment. Then he directed and starred, as a cowardly Italian conscript, in Private Angelo (1949), winning recognition as a film character actor.
In 1950-51 he gave four film performances of this kind: in the French Resistance biopic Odette with Anna Neagle; in the comedy Hotel Sahara; in We're No Angels as an escaped convict alongside Humphrey Bogart; and as Nero in the Hollywood epic Quo Vadis, which earned him his first Oscar nomination, but laid bare an inhibition: he could not portray passionate feelings without looking foolish.
The year 1952 saw plaudits for his most successful play, The Love Of Four Colonels, a Cold War satirical burlesque in which Russia, America, Britain and France partition the land in which the Sleeping Beauty lies. Although slightly verbose, the masterpiece ran for years all over the world and became a staple of amateur dramatic societies. At the same time he was collaborating on BBC radio with Frank Muir, Denis Norden and the actor Peter Jones on the improvised series In All Directions, regarded as a forerunner of the Goon Show.
In 1956 he had another durable stage hit with Romanoff and Juliet, another Cold War satire, later filmed. In 1960 came his best film acting as Batiatus, the self-disparaging slave dealer in Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus. It won him an Oscar for best supporting actor, as did Topkapi only four years later.
Although he was in 21 more films in the next 30 years, he had no more triumphs; nearly all the films were abysmal. On the stage, the tolerant, discursive, boulevard theatre was disappearing.
The turning point was the most ambitious project of his life, his effort in 1961 to direct and produce Herman Melville's naval allegory of good and evil, Billy Budd. It shot Terence Stamp to stardom but was a near-disaster, partly because to guarantee backing Ustinov had to miscast himself as the idealistic but impotent authority figure, Captain Vere. The performance was a melodramatic embarrassment, as he acknowledged.
It began to seem clear, despite his desire to project himself as a thinker on great moral issues, that audiences wanted him to be just afunny, foreign fat man. As a pundit he was handicapped by verbosity. In 1998 he had a critical success in Moscow directing an opera at the Bolshoi. It went unreported in Britain, and in Russia was headlined "Englishman Saves The Bolshoi". He said: "I've never been accused of being English before. It seems rather painful, especially coming from my original country."
Gradually he relaxed - and slightly coarsened - into the role his admirers seemed to want, a globetrotting, tax-exiled celebrity who told uproarious tales in funny foreign voices, and into the Hercule Poirot film series, which allowed him painfully little range. He became, as he once said, "a dancing bear" and worked hard at it.
But in addition to being a celebrity, he shuttled about on behalf of Unicef, the world children's agency, and was president of the little-known World Federalist Movement. Last year he was honoured with a graduate college named after him at Durham University, where he was chancellor.
He was married three times: in 1940 to the actress Isolde Denham, with whom he had a daughter, the actress Tamara Ustinov; in 1954 to the actress Suzanne Cloutier, with whom he had a son and two daughters; and in 1972 to the freelance political journalist, Hélène de Lau d'Allemans.
Petrus Alexandrus (Peter Alexander) Ustinov: born April 16th, 1921; died March 28th, 2004