Death of Briton David Warner, actor of “Titanic” and “The Curse”

From Shakespeare to star trek would be a hasty and far too simplistic way of summing up the career of David Warner. It was, he would have said, less to make a career than to escape a chaotic childhood and a complicated family life that he chose to become an actor. David Warner died on July 24, in London, following a long illness. He was 80 years old.

He was born in Manchester on July 29, 1941. His parents were not married and, after their separation, shared custody of a child tossed from one family home to another. After a disastrous schooling and a series of odd jobs, he entered the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, from which he graduated in 1961, before becoming a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company. He will be the youngest actor to have played Hamlet. He made his film debut in Tom Jonesby Tony Richardson, in 1963, then obtained the main role, that of a man-child gradually sinking into madness, in Morganby Karel Reisz, in 1966. Work Is a Four-Letter Word (1968), by Peter Hall, gave him the opportunity to play an eccentric young man who preferred to cultivate hallucinogenic mushrooms rather than go to work.

Regularly, a title sometimes stands out according to an abundant and varied filmography, because David Warner turns out to be a workaholic

After an adaptation of The Seagullby Chekhov, directed by Sidney Lumet (1968), and another, the same year, by Dream of a summer night, signed Peter Hall, it was Sam Peckinpah who truly opened the doors of the new Hollywood to him by giving him the role of Reverend Joshua Douglas Sloane in A named Cable Hogue (1970), confidant and friend of the hero, played by Jason Robards, in what will turn out to be a melancholic farewell to the old West. Peckinpah will re-employ him in straw dogsin 1971, where he will be one of the violent attackers of the cottage occupied by Dustin Hoffman and Susan George.

He will appear again in 1977 in another title directed by Peckinpah, the war film Iron Cross, disillusioned and scathing vision of warrior virilism. He is Captain Kiesel of the Wermacht, aide-de-camp to Colonel Brandt played by James Mason. The two men form a duo of lucid and disgusted soldiers, witnesses and actors of the collapse of the Russian front in 1943. The roles will accumulate at full speed, without slowing down, until its disappearance. Regularly, a title sometimes stands out according to an abundant and varied filmography, because David Warner turns out to be a workaholic.

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