THE FINAL FRONTIER
David Warner 1941-2022
IN 1974’S FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE AN unearthly, mirror-dwelling evil tells David Warner “We are legion” – before claiming his face for its own. The entity could have been describing the Manchester-born actor’s prolific amount of screen roles over the coming decades. That Amicus Productions chiller may have been Warner’s first brush with horror, but his raw-boned, sepulchral features ensured he became a genre mainstay.
Trained at RADA, Warner was an acclaimed Hamlet at the RSC in 1965 and made a Bafta-nominated big-screen breakthrough the next year in Morgan: A Suitable Case For Treatment. Cinema soon capitalised on a presence that could tilt effortlessly from haunter to hauntee.
As conspiracy-minded photographer Keith Jennings, he earned the most memorable of The Omen’s many death scenes, decapitated by satanic forces, and conjured an authentically terrifying Jack the Ripper in Time After Time, which loosed the Victorian killer on modernday San Francisco.
Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits saw Warner play the reality-twisting Evil, while 1982’s Tron found him as sinister software executive Dillinger, expanding his matchless creepiness into the digital realm. Star Trek mined his talent on multiple occasions: wasted as dissolute Federation envoy St John Talbot in The Final Frontier, he brought compassion
and gravitas to Klingon chancellor Gorkon in The Undiscovered Country and was the formidable Cardassian interrogator Gul Madred in The Next Generation two-parter “Chain Of Command”.
Warner’s genre legacy is everywhere: the voice of Ra’s al Ghul in Batman: The Animated Series, Jor-el in The New Adventures Of Superman, the reanimated creature opposite Carrie Fisher in 1984’s Frankenstein. From Twin Peaks to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret Of The Ooze, he was a modest, hard-working icon, the crucial connective tissue in so much screen fantasy. Not bad for a man who once claimed he was motivated by “a driving lack of ambition”.
Bernard Cribbins 1928-2022
ONE OF THE MOST BELOVED OF British entertainers, Bernard Cribbins brought a trademark warmth and quirkiness to his excursions into screen fantasy. Hammer’s 1965 adaptation of H Rider Haggard’s She teamed him with Peter Cushing, and the pair reunited the next year in Daleks’ Invasion Earth 2150 AD, where Cribbins mixed slapstick with bravado as companion Tom Campbell.
After guest shots in The Avengers, Casino Royale (1967) and Space: 1999 he returned to Doctor Who in 2007 as Wilfred Mott, a role he recently reprised for the show’s 60th anniversary specials. Cribbins was also a serious contender for the Doctor himself after Jon Pertwee quit in 1974.
Alan Grant 1949-2022
BRITISH COMICS WRITER KNOWN FOR his work on 2000 AD and Batman, co-creating Victor Zsasz and the Ventriloquist. NS