Obituary: Sir Peter Ustinov

By PHOEBE FALCONER

Actor, director, writer. Died aged 82.

Oscar-winning British actor and playwright Peter Ustinov, one of the world's best-loved raconteurs and mimics, has died at the age of 82, after a career spanning more than 60 years.

Ustinov died of heart failure in a clinic near his home on the shores of Lake Geneva on Sunday night.

Much of Ustinov's humour was based on the difference between nationalities, perhaps because of his own ancestry, a mixture of French, Italian, German and Russian, with elements of Ethiopian and Swiss.

"I am very grateful for the indiscriminate behaviour of my ancestors," he once said.

His first big stage success, The Love of Four Colonels, was based on four officers, British, American, Russian and French, all trying to make a beauty fall in love with them.

He won Oscars for his roles in the films Spartacus and Topkapi. His last public performance was a tribute to the late film director Stanley Kubrick, during which he imitated everyone who was present at the first reading of the script of Spartacus, including Tony Curtis, Jean Simmons, Charles Laughton and Herbert Lom.

Not only could he imitate voices and accents, he could take on physical characteristics by a twist of his face or a pucker of the lips.

Born in London in 1921, Ustinov attended Gibb's Preparatory School in Sloane St, where he made his stage debut as a pig. He went on to Westminster School, but his mother feared he would not graduate and sent him off to join a theatre company in France.

After a spell in repertory, the cost of married life and fatherhood demanded a larger revenue, and Ustinov made a number of films, including One of Our Aircraft is Missing and The Goose Steps Out. He was called up for war service in 1942, where he declared a preference for tanks "because you can go into battle sitting down".

Demobilised in 1946, Ustinov's career on the stage and in film expanded, and he both wrote and starred with luminaries Ralph Richardson, Edith Evans, David Niven, Carol Reed and John Gielgud.

His delight in self-parody made him a successful Hercule Poirot in the adaptations of Agatha Christie's murder mysteries Death on the Nile, Evil Under the Sun and Appointment With Death.

He was versatile, energetic and prolific: he wrote 23 plays, 13 books and nine films, acted in 40 films and 20 plays, and directed eight films, eight plays and 14 operas. Derek Malcolm, the film critic, described him as a "jack of all trades, master of none - but what a jack!".

"He was one of the funniest men I have ever met," Ustinov's biographer John Miller said. "He had enough careers for about six other men. He was phenomenally busy."

He travelled the world on behalf of Unicef, the world children's agency.

Just 18 months ago, Ustinov said he was happy to work until he dropped "as long as I can be guaranteed that I won't know in advance when it's going to happen".

He was Chancellor of the University of Durham and shortly before his death the University of Vienna inaugurated the Ustinov Institute, dedicated to studying prejudice.

Ustinov was the first to admit that laughter had been a life-long drug, confessing: "I was irrevocably betrothed to laughter, the sound of which has always seemed to me to be the most civilised music in the world."

He was once asked what would be his ideal epitaph.

With a familiar twinkle in his eye, he swiftly decided on the perfect inscription for his tombstone: "Keep off the grass."

Sir Peter Ustinov married three times, and received his knighthood in 1990. He is survived by his third wife, Helene du Lau d'Allemans, three daughters and a son.