David Warner
Acclaimed stage actor of the 1960s who went on to portray wildly varied characters on screen
DAVID WARNER, the actor, who has died aged 80, was one of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s widely acclaimed discoveries of the 1960s in its heyday under Peter Hall; tall, lean, gangling, long-faced, he triumphed first in one of Shakespeare’s least-known roles, Henry VI, which he brought to life in the RSC’S quatercentenary cycle, The Wars of the Roses, and again with a resolutely “contemporary” interpretation of Hamlet.
But within a decade of those early glories, which he achieved in his early twenties, Warner was drawn increasingly to the cinema – not that he took it as seriously as he had the classical stage, but as he said, when living in Los Angeles years later, “I am a letterbox actor. If the script comes through the letterbox I’ll do it. It’s all fun, and you get something out of it.”
Peter Hall considered Warner “potentially one of the greatest stage actors”, possessing “that authentic quality that makes you hang on to their every word, understand their every thought, note their merest gesture”.
None the less, if his talent seemed to some wasted, he found ready employment before the cameras, going on to amass more than 200 credits.
Success might have been sporadic, but he was lauded in neurotic-comic roles such as the failed artist in Karel Reisz’s Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment (1966); the trusting bombardier in Jack Gold’s The Bofors Gun (1968), and the crazy cultivator of psychedelic mushrooms in Hall’s Work is a Four-letter Word the same year (from the Henry Livings stage fantasy Eh?, in which he had starred).
He also played the domineering banker Torvald Helmer in Joseph Losey’s adaptation of A Doll’s House (1973), and had satisfying moments as an astrophysicist in Alain Resnais’s Providence (1977), as well as in three films by Sam Peckinpah, The Ballad of Cable Hogue, Straw Dogs (in which he had his name expunged from the credits in a row over the size of his billing) and Cross of Iron.
David Hattersley Warner was born in Manchester on July 29 1941, the son of Herbert, a Russian Jew who owned a nursing home, and Ada Hattersley. He was born out of wedlock and was initially shunted between parents, eventually settling with his father and stepmother.
He attended several schools – principally Feldon School in Leamington Spa – at one of which he played Lady Macbeth. Then, after working as a bookseller and newspaper vendor, he trained at Rada, where his contemporaries included John Hurt and Ian Mcshane.
His first professional stage appearance was a walk-on as a Nubian slave in Aida at Covent Garden, while his first speaking part was as Snout in Tony Richardson’s 1962 Royal Court revival of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
After other small parts in plays including Much Ado About Nothing in Coventry, he appeared in David Rudkin’s play about Black Country fruit-pickers, Afore Night Come, in the RSC’S experimental London season, then joined the company.
After playing Trinculo in The Tempest and the poet Cinna in Julius Caesar – and still within a year of leaving drama school – Warner created a great stir as Henry VI in the celebrated The Wars of the Roses trilogy.
The critic Kenneth Tynan wrote: “I have seldom witnessed such a finished performance by an actor who has barely started. Mr Warner... cares about his subjects, whom he addresses in a vein of embarrassed regret, as befits a man who believes in peace yet cannot enforce his will. When he is murdered by Richard, Duke of York, he accepts the blade not only with forgiveness but with a kind of wry affection for his assassin. I have seen nothing more Christ-like in modern theatre.”
If Warner’s performance of Henry VI – weak, isolated, suffering – renewed interest in a rare Shakespearean character, his Hamlet turned out to be one of the most controversial for years, reflecting in its mumbled ruminations and bescarfed bewilderment the modish spirit of the 1960s.
Stooping, slouching, sneering at his elders (and unlike any Renaissance prince with his faint Midlands accent, spotty complexion and contemporary undergraduate manners), Warner set the student section of his audience buzzing with excitement, provoking nightly cheers from the balcony, while older playgoers sat truculently below.
One of the most conspicuous examples of Peter Hall’s policy of promoting young players within a permanent company, Warner went on to appear in the expanding The Wars of the Roses sequence – one of the RSC’S most glorious achievements, totalling seven productions. It was such a hit that no one noticed that half of the author’s lines had been cut and 1,400 added to retain the historical narrative and clarify the plotting.
As the Sixties progressed, Warner turned increasingly to film work, and after 1973, when he developed stage fright during an ill-fated run of I, Claudius, he spent most of time on screen. “He just disappeared from view,” Hall recalled, “and the next thing we knew, he was in Hollywood, doing bits in movies.”
He had made his film speaking debut in Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones (1963), while on the small screen that year he appeared with Bob Dylan in the BBC play Madhouse on Castle Street.
Three years later came the role that established his reputation for playing slightly unhinged characters, as the artist Morgan Delt trying to win back his wife Leonie (played by Vanessa Redgrave), in Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment. In 1974 he played the nerdy Dennis Charles Nipple in the oddball Little Malcolm, which won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival.
He also developed a penchant for playing villains, in films such as The Thirty Nine Steps (1978); Time Bandits (1981), in which he was a malevolent being suitably named Evil; and one of the first films to depend heavily on CGI, Tron (1982).
He was a Cardassian interrogator in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation on television, having already appeared in two Star Trek movies, and was later the rogue agent Alpha in Men in Black: The Series. In The Omen (1976) he was the hapless journalist Keith Jennings, who ends up decapitated by a sheet of glass.
In 1987 he decamped to Los Angeles, where he remained for 15 years. His parts during that time were wildly varied: he played a professor in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze (1991), while in 1997 he was Spicer Lovejoy, valet and bodyguard to the arrogant Caledon Hockley (Billy Zane), in James Cameron’s Titanic.
In 2001 he made a much-heralded return to the theatre as Andrew Undershaft in a Broadway revival of George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara, then four years later was back on a Shakespearean stage, as King Lear in Stephen Pimlott’s production at the Chichester Festival Theatre.
Warner developed a late-flowering relationship with Doctor Who, appearing as an alternate Doctor in a 2003 audio drama, while in 2009, he was the voice of Lord Azlok of the Viperox, an insectoid alien race, in the animated Doctor Who serial “Dreamland”. In 2016 and 2017 he returned as the alternate Doctor in further audio dramas.
David Warner was twice married and divorced, to Harriet Lindgren (1969-72) and Sheilah Kent (1981-2002). He is survived by his partner, the actress Lisa Bowerman, and by a daughter and son of his second marriage.
David Warner, born July 29 1941, died July 24 2022