Pleasance, Donald

Pleasance, Donald (1919-1995), British film actor, memorable for roles of understated menace. He was born in Worksop, Nottinghamshire, and initially followed his father into employment in the railways, rising to station manager before deciding to study acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. He became manager of a theatre in Jersey in 1939, making his stage debut in an adaptation of Wuthering Heights the same year. His London debut, in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, followed in 1942. After war service in the RAF, and a year as a prisoner of war, he returned to the stage in London and in provincial repertory companies. In 1951 he made his Broadway debut in Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra.

Pleasance was 35 before he made his first film, though he worked prolifically in the medium thereafter. His high, shining dome (he went bald at a relatively young age), whispering voice, and pale, staring blue eyes marked him at once for sinister or eccentric roles, and he played minor villains and creepy characters in numerous British films, including The Flesh and the Fiends and Killers of Kilimanjaro (both 1959). Television made him well known, as Prince John in the popular series Robin Hood (1955-1957), but he achieved widespread fame on stage as the tramp in The Caretaker (1960) by Harold Pinter. He made the role his own, and reprised it in the film version of the play (The Guest, 1963). Roman Polanski seized on Pleasance’s unsettling persona for Cul-de-Sac (1966), in which he starred as a disturbed recluse tormented by marauding crooks.

Inevitably, he played the villain (the cat-loving Blofeld) in a James Bond film, You Only Live Twice (1967), and at various times played several of the darkest characters of history: Pontius Pilate (The Passover Plot, 1976), Dr Crippen (Dr Crippen, 1962), Thomas Cromwell (Henry VIII and his Six Wives, 1973), and Satan (The Greatest Story Ever Told, 1965). Even when Pleasance was playing a nominally sympathetic character there was something disturbing about him: in Escape from New York (1981, directed by John Carpenter), as the US president being rescued from the giant prison camp of Manhattan, it was hard not to suspect that he deserved to be there. Carpenter also memorably cast him as the psychiatrist on the trail of the killer in Halloween (1978), one of Pleasance’s most impressive horror-film appearances. His malevolent, or at best ambivalent, roles made his rare appearances as a genuinely sympathetic character, such as the saintly Reverend Septimus Harding in the BBC’s Barchester Chronicles (1984) all the more affecting. Despite his late start in the cinema, by the time he died he had made nearly 180 film and television appearances.