Leon Vitali obituary
Leon Vitali, who has died aged 72, occupied a unique position in the life and cinema of Stanley Kubrick. He was assistant, facilitator, casting adviser, archivist, intermediary and dogsbody. “A sort of gatekeeper” was how Vitali put it in 2018. It could be difficult to tell where one man ended and the other began: Kubrick sometimes signed letters with Vitali’s name, while Vitali had permission to tell intransigent colleagues: “What you say to me, you say to Stanley.” The men even shared the same birthday, two decades apart.
They met when Vitali was cast at the age of 24 in the director’s magisterial Thackeray adaptation Barry Lyndon (1975). Vitali gave an indignant, explosive performance as Lord Bullingdon, who rages against his stepfather, an opportunistic cad played by Ryan O’Neal, finally challenging him to a pistol duel. The confrontation, which begins with Bullingdon misfiring his gun before vomiting in a corner of the barn, is agonisingly protracted.
Vitali gave up acting soon after to work exclusively for Kubrick behind the scenes. “I just became fascinated with the way he was shooting and how many actors were involved and the organisation of the whole thing,” he explained.
Their next collaboration was on Kubrick’s film of Stephen King’s horror novel The Shining (1980). The director asked Vitali to scour the US looking for a child actor to play the role of a boy with psychic powers. Out of 4,000 children, he found the remarkable Danny Lloyd, who was just four years old at the time of their first meeting.
Having coaxed Lloyd out of his shyness at the audition, and coached him on set during filming, Vitali can take some credit for his eerily fine performance. He also brought to Kubrick’s attention the young girls who play the ghosts of murdered twins, spotting in their appearance echoes of Diane Arbus’s unnerving portrait of twin sisters.
His duties continued throughout the rest of Kubrick’s life. For the Vietnam war drama Full Metal Jacket (1987), shot largely at Beckton gas works in east London, he was instrumental in putting on-screen the reallife drill sergeant R Lee Ermey, originally hired as a consultant, and in helping to script and shape the scenes in which that character viciously berates the new recruits.
Alongside his responsibilities on the erotically charged thriller Eyes Wide Shut (1999), starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, he played several different characters during scenes set at a masked orgy. He assisted Kubrick, too, on projects that never reached the screen, including Aryan Papers, a drama about the Holocaust, and AI Artificial Intelligence, eventually made in 2001 by Steven Spielberg.
Vitali’s contributions remained largely unsung until the release in 2017 of the penetrating documentary Filmworker, which drew on many hours of candid interviews with him, and provided the first in-depth insights into his life and career.
High points of creative fulfilment were punctuated by more troubling accounts: the breakdown he suffered while spending 36-hour shifts checking prints of Eyes Wide Shut, or the wideranging sacrifices he made to his personal life. (The director grudgingly allowed him to take the morning off on Christmas Day.)
However, he rejected the idea that the relationship had been an abusive one. “I wanted to be with Stanley, to work with Stanley,” he says in the film. “I wanted to.”
Vitali was born in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, and studied acting at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. He quickly notched up an array of television credits, including Z Cars, Crown Court, Follyfoot and Dixon of Dock Green, in which his cherubic looks were offset by a captivating intelligence or surliness.
Vitali was a regular on the sitcom The Fenn Street Gang (1971-72), a sequel to the earlier comedy series Please Sir!, in which he had also briefly appeared. He starred with Trevor Howard, Martin Sheen and Michael Gambon in Catholics (1973), shown in ITV’s Sunday Night Theatre strand.
Prior to Barry Lyndon, his one film role was in the crime drama Super Bitch (1973), a British-Italian co-production released in the UK as Blue Movie Blackmail. After meeting Kubrick, he made only a handful of other screen appearances. These included playing Victor Frankenstein in Terror of Frankenstein (1977) and the apothecary in a 2013 version of Romeo and Juliet, freely adapted by Julian Fellowes.
Vitali went on to work with the actor-director Todd Field, who had a small role in Eyes Wide Shut. On Field’s Oscar-nominated In the Bedroom (2001), Vitali was credited as “technical consultant”, while he was an associate producer on Little Children (2006).
Even Kubrick’s death in 1999 did not curtail his work for the director: there were still prints to check, designs to oversee, subtitles to approve, an entire legacy to maintain. “There’s always something to do,” he said. “Stanley’s films are always being shown somewhere.”
He was seriously ill during the making of Filmworker, even close to death at one point, but rallied enough to attend its premiere at Cannes. Before leaving home, Vitali realised he did not have a tuxedo. Finding in his wardrobe the one sported by Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut, he wore that instead.
He is survived by his third wife, Sharon Messer, and by three children: Vera and Max, from his marriage to the costume designer Kersti (nee Gustafsson), which ended in divorce, and Masha, from his first marriage.
•Alfred Leon Vitali, actor and film assistant, born 26 July 1948; died 19 August 2022