Peter Ustinov 1921-2004

Peter Ustinov 1921-2004
A genius of his generation who chose to live by his wit

* Philip French
*
o Philip French
o The Observer,
o Sunday April 4 2004
o Article history

It is a sad week when two people you don't know, but who have played a bigger part in your life over a period of 60 years than most of your friends and relatives, die within 48 hours of each other. I refer, of course, to those great writers, performers, raconteurs, social observers and men of the world, the 95-year-old Alistair Cooke, and his junior by some 12 years Peter Ustinov. They lived full lives that were never quite fulfilled. Both were self-creations, Cooke as a patrician observer of the world's largest democracy, Ustinov as a shambling aristocrat in exile.

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I first came across Ustinov when he was a baby-faced movie actor during the Second World War playing a member of the Hitler Youth (but a secret resistance worker) in the Will Hay comedy The Goose Steps Out, then a Dutch pastor who assists in the escape of a downed RAF aircrew in Michael Powell's One of Our Aircraft is Missing, both films made in 1942. Cooke I encountered in 1944 as a 10-year-old schoolboy when Trans-Atlantic Quiz, the BBC radio programme he chaired, created in me a lifelong obsession with America. Ustinov appeared on the programme once, its youngest guest, and claims to have scored nul points.

A decade later he played a star role as Samuel Johnson in Cooke's prestigious American TV arts series, Omnibus. Ustinov's live appearance (with a thick beard concealed by make-up artists to impersonate the clean-shaven Johnson) became part of his inexhaustible well of anecdotes. Only David Niven could match him as a comic observer of the film industry. Both are hilarious on working with Michael Curtiz, Niven in the Forties, Ustinov in the Fifties. Curtiz, Ustinov said, 'had forgotten his native Hungarian without commanding a use of English, leaving him in a linguistic limbo'.

A highlight of both Niven's and Ustinov's careers was the superb wartime propaganda movie, The Way Ahead, directed by Major Carol Reed, co-scripted by Lt Colonel Eric Ambler and Private Peter Ustinov, and starring Major David Niven. This was an enlarged, politically diluted version of the instructional short, The New Lot, which had disturbed the military establishment through the subversive comments worked into it by Ambler and Ustinov. It was suppressed for 50 years before turning up in the archives of the Imperial War Museum in the Nineties.

For grammar school boys in the mid-Forties, Ustinov was our Orson Welles, a figure of infinite promise who only went beyond his initial prodigious achievement to be embraced by those he despised. Both got plump and prosperous, richly rewarded for appearing in other people's films and waxing wise on talk shows. The first idiomatic phrase I learnt in my first year of French was enfant terrible, attached to Ustinov in a magazine article. I took plays of his out of the library, loved his idiosyncratic film Vice Versa (1947). He played with theatrical forms as disconcertingly diverse as Pirandello and Priestley. My favourite opening of any play is the beginning of his 1951 comedy The Love of Four Colonels. Four army officers sit around in the communal mess of some postwar region shared between the French, German, Russian and British occupying forces. No one says anything. Time passes. The audience shuffles in embarrassment. Suddenly the British colonel says: 'We seem to have run out of conversation.' A perfect comment on the Cold War in its late Stalinist phase.

Keats wrote in 1819: 'A man's life of any worth is a continual allegory. Shakespeare led a life of allegory: his works are the comments on it.' One might say that Ustinov's life is an alle gorical comedy of twentieth century life, and that his work is a commentary on its absurdity. I never met him, though I often saw him on stage, talking or acting. The first time was in the late Forties when he addressed the Bristol Old Vic Society one Sunday night at the Theatre Royal. In a surprisingly aggressive answer to a question from a hard-line Communist, Ustinov challenged the use of the terms 'people' and 'masses'. This was part of my youthful education in politics.

One of my favourite images of Ustinov is connected with my time at Oxford. In the summer of 1956 there was an open-air college production of Turgenev's A Month in the Country in the gardens of Christ Church, and only one person turned up for the matinee. But this solitary patron was Ustinov, in Oxford with his play Romanoff and Juliet which was on its way to the West End. Everyone acted their hearts out, and at the end Ustinov walked up to the stage applauding as he went, and he shook the hands of the whole cast.

Another favourite memory concerns something he said to Orson Welles in 1962. Ustinov had completed his flawed but splendid film of Billy Budd . Welles asked him what he thought of it and Ustinov replied: 'I don't know whether it's any good, but I'm proud of it.'