Peter Ustinov

Renaissance man is back with two new movies by Director Gary Singer

by Kevin Lewis | Published August 31, 1999

David Niven, George Kennedy and Peter Ustinov in Death on the Nile (1978).

During the '60s, Peter Ustinov was a Renaissance man if ever there were one. He wrote plays, short stories, screenplays, directed films, plays and operas, was an internationally acclaimed movie star who won two Best Supporting Actor Oscars (Spartacus, 1960, and Topkapi, 1964). He wrote an autobiography, was a vied-for talk show guest because of his brilliance as a raconteur, received dozens of honorary doctorates, and still had time left to meet with the world's leaders as Ambassador at Large for Unicef.

Sir Peter Ustinov (he was knighted in 1976), now 78, is back in the public eye thanks to two movies, Stiff Upper Lips, which opens nation­ally this month, and The Bachelor, which opens in     November. Both are directed by Gary Sinyor, who co-wrote Stiff Upper Lips. In The Bachelor, Ustinov, who has always been considered hip amongst brainy young people, co-stars with Chris O'Donnell, Mariah Carey and Brooke Shields. PBS viewers are also currently enjoying his four-part miniseries, On the Trail of Mark Twain with Peter Ustinov, which traces equatorial societies 100 years after Mark Twain wrote Following the Equator. His previous documentaries, many of which he wrote, on topics including Beethoven, Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Russia and the Vatican, frequently reappear on PBS.

In the late '70s and early '80s, Ustinov portrayed the Agatha Christie detective Hercule Poirot in Death on the Nile and Evil Under the Sun, and he is still associated closely with that role. He also played another famous detective, Charlie Chan, in two movies, and narrowly missed playing Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther movies. He was signed for the original movie, but rejected the deal when Ava Gardner was replaced by Capucine. Peter Sellers became a household name in the role and, ironically, Ustinov instead chose Topkapi (1964) when Sellers backed out of that movie.

Sir Peter, who lives in Paris, was in New York in July promoting Stiff Upper Lips. Age has not diminished his humor or his interest in diverse artistic and political matters. Even in the incredibly baroque St. Regis Hotel reception room, he overpowers his surroundings. Somehow it is not at all surprising when Sinyor characterizes him as one "who knows many of the world's leaders on a social basis."

Stiff Upper Lips, set in 1908, is a biting satire of the silly, arrogant but sexually repressed, entitled English who were delineated by E.M. Forster in his novels, and also the Merchant-Ivory film adaptations. Although a period film, Stiff Upper Lips, which is absurd and surreal­istic without being ridiculous, has contemporary reverberations for countries who reject the humanity of others in the name of national identity. "The nastiness is always there," Ustinov says. "In the case of Britain, to my mind, Britain has always been a nation of pirates, of people who make laws but don't necessarily respect them, of swash­bucklers. And then came Queen Victoria with a very long reign, and she found very little amusing." He recalls a scene in his play Photo Finish (1962) in which a father sums up for his son what is in effect moral hypocrisy: "In my day there were things that were done, and there were things that were not done, and there was even a way of doing those  things that were not done." He laughs, "And that's the whole of Victorian England to me; it was utterly hypocrit­ical-but it exists everywhere."

Though his knighthood makes him a symbol of the United Kingdom, Sir Peter, who was born in London in 1921, is hardly a defender of the class system. "I am not English, and therefore feel freer to comment on all that, and the director, Gary Sinyor, isn't either, and it was his baby. He has roughly the same sort of standpoint as I do because he is an Egyptian Jew" Sinyor told Ustinov that his father was very keen to appear to be as English as possible, "which was also the case with my father," Ustinov says. "Out of this is born a certain sharpness of vision which is not really necessarily the habit among native sons." Ustinov agrees that he is more international than English. "My grandfather was exiled from Russia in 1860, so we're really not a Red or a White tradition, but pink."

Ustinov's Hollywood career could easily have been curtailed during the blacklisting era because of his BBC broadcasts attacking McCarthyism. "I wasn't American and there was a columnist who attacked me called Jimmy Fidler, and he said, "Is this the way to repay American hospitality-by attacking [Senator Joseph] McCarthy? "When I was asked by the BBC to do two half-hour pieces exclusively on McCarthy. They must have known what they were doing, but it was very interesting because I was very scathing about McCarthy, who I thought was a terrible anomaly in American life. I never got into trouble because I always said I had no allegiance to a flag. I had no allegiance to anything if I didn't know who was holding it," he said, chuckling.

Stiff Upper Lips

Ustinov directed Terence Stamp, Robert Ryan, and Melvyn Douglas in Billy Budd (1962), Sophia Loren, Paul Newman, and David Niven in Lady L (1966) and Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in Hammersmith Is Out (1972), but he has abandoned film direction. "I thought I'm not a professional film director. In order to be that, you have to stay with that job the whole time because techni­cally there are so many changes. Nowadays, even when I do a film like this, my intelligence tells me what to do, but all the technical demands are completely dif­ferent from what they used to be. So, I thought, it's really not my job, and I prefer writing, really. I enjoy writing very much."

Does being an actor make it easier to direct other actors? "No, you can't project yourself onto another actor. He has qualities which you haven't got, otherwise he wouldn't be doing the part. I let anything happen and then say, `That's not quite the right way, try something else. Obviously, I'm not a dictator. I hate dictators; I hate dictators who say, `You've got to do it this way,' or who give you an inflection. It's absolutely impossible. I'm very much opposed to that. They have to find it themselves, but sometimes it takes longer than you would like."

Ustinov doesn't rehearse exten­sively, and can't recall going beyond eight takes per scene. There are good    actors who give you exactly what they rehearse, and there are better actors who make the effort, which has to be hidden, of giving you the impression that what they're doing is actually happening at that moment. And not as many as you imagine do that. There are quite a few actors who are in a solid mode and know exactly what they rehearse-you've got to be able to take yourself by surprise the whole time, within the limits of the psychological verity of what you are doing.

"The Method is often very good so long as it doesn't become a restrictive influence. Sometimes it's restrictive in that it slows up reactions and makes people grope instead of doing things. I think the whole art of acting is one of extremely quick reactions."

With Prunella Scales in Stiff Upper Lips (1999)

Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, with whom he acted in The Comedians and directed in Hammersmith Is Out, were close friends. "Burton had a great talent. He could have been a very good writer if he'd wished. But I don't think that the use of the Burtons as a couple of ideal lovers was really quite well thought out, because you can't get the same spark off a couple that know each other as well as those two [did] and who pretend they've fallen in love for the first time. It's really too difficult and too much to ask."

His plays The Love of Four Colonels (1951) and Romanoff and Juliet (1957), which he directed as a film in 1961, reflect his passion for world cooperation. "Being of extremely mixed blood, in Serbian terms, I'm ethni­cally filthy, and extremely proud of it. Therefore, my only real allegiance in this world, apart from civilized behavior, is the United Nations. I'm a firm believer that it's the only hope. After the failure of the League of Nations, we mustn't let the whole thing slip out of our hands, because it also recognizes things which NATO doesn't ­that every nation is unfortunately, but inevitably, at a different stage of development at the same moment. The bombing of Kosovo didn't lead anywhere at all and it's going to be a much worse mess."

Since 1991, Ustinov has been President of the World Federalist Movement, a non­governmental organization committed to world peace through world law. Among its missions is the establishment of a world fed­eration through the UN of the international criminal court, which would intervene on matters of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. "Non-government organi­zations are becoming more and more important as a form of democracy," he states. "I'm absolutely for the concept of national identity so long as it is cradled into a form of interdependence, which is absolutely neces­sary. I'm against a form of national identity which is in any way constituted at the expense of third parties. I don't think it makes any sense whatsoever. As somebody of mixed blood, I feel that no blood has any special value above another. It's nonsense to think so." MM

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Comment by mariah carey on 4/10/08 at 8:00 am

very good article thanks :)

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