“Peckinpah has a place in, if not my heart, my life. “It was really marvelous for me to get back in front of the camera,” he said. Not true,” he told The New York Times in 1971.ĭespite his injuries, Peckinpah still employed him, uncredited, in Straw Dogs. You can say that if you like! There are all sorts of slanderous stories about drugs and drink. “One story is that I was in bed with Claudia Cardinale when my wife arrived and I jumped out of the window. In 1970, Warner fell from a window in Rome, broke both his heels and was in danger of never being able to walk again. Peckinpah insisted, however, and it was arranged for Warner to travel by ship to New York via Barcelona, by train to Los Angeles via Chicago and then by car to a desert outside Las Vegas. In 1968, he appeared in The Bofors Gun, Work Is a Four Letter Word, John Frankenheimer’s The Fixer and Sidney Lumet’s The Sea Gull before Peckinpah wanted him - badly - for The Ballad of Cable Hogue.Īt the last minute, Warner was hit with a panic attack and was unable to get on a plane, so he told his agent he would have to pass on the film. Locked into his contract at Stratford, he was unable to accept offers to come to Hollywood right away. There have been stories over the years that Warner was Wes Craven’s first choice (not Robert Englund) to play the sinister Freddy Krueger in the original A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), but those were discounted by the actor in the 2016 book Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy. Thirty-four years after he was in his first Oscar best picture winner, Warner was in another one, portraying the cutthroat Spicer Lovejoy, the loyal-to-a-fault valet/bodyguard who works for Billy Zane’s industrialist Cal Hockley, in James Cameron’s Titanic (1997). Of course, I didn’t understand what was going on.” They put it together and it was quite extraordinary. “It was on film, not video, and they had to color every single frame. “It was very interesting to do it because you know we were all on black sets and with our costumes the way they were,” he said in a 2021 interview. In the groundbreaking Disney film, Warner played Ed Dillinger, the scheming ENCOM senior executive who swipes Kevin Flynn’s ( Jeff Bridges) work and passes it off as his own SARK, the malevolent living program inside the mainframe and the voice of the rogue Master Control Program. “When others say no,” he once said, “I say yes.” Sometimes, he got the part because he was the “cheapest” one available, he joked.Īfter portraying the nefarious Jack the Ripper opposite Malcolm McDowell in Nicholas Meyer’s Time After Time (1979) and the character aptly named Evil in Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits (1981) - he said he got that gig because Jonathan Pryce was busy elsewhere - Warner turned it up a notch for Tron (1982). He rarely refused a role, as evidenced by his 220-plus acting credits on IMDb. Alfred Necessiter in Carl Reiner’s The Man With Two Brains (1983) and the ape Senator Sandar in Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes (2001). The self-effacing Warner also was the ill-fated photojournalist Keith Jennings in Richard Donner‘s The Omen (1976), the wacky scientist Dr. He received a Theatre World Award in the process. John Talbot in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989), the peaceful Klingon Chancellor Gorkon in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991) and the Cardassian officer Gul Madred on Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1992.īefore he stood out as the vile Blifil in the Oscar best picture winner Tom Jones (1963), the lanky Manchester native studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and starred in several plays for Peter Hall at the then-fledgling Royal Shakespeare Company.Ī bout with stage fright kept him away from the theater for nearly three decades until he returned to play munitions magnate Andrew Undershaft in the 2001 Broadway revival of George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara. Star Trek fans know Warner for portraying three different species in the franchise: the human Federation representative St. In the first film he made in the U.S., Warner portrayed the itinerant preacher Joshua Duncan Sloane in Sam Peckinpah’s The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970), and the filmmaker brought him back to play the village idiot Henry Niles in Straw Dogs (1971) and the German officer Kiesel in Cross of Iron (1977). 'Banshees of Inisherin,' 'Bad Sisters' Dominate Irish Academy Awards Nominations
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