He also played the domineering banker Torvald Helmer in Joseph Losey’s adaptation of A Doll’s House (1973), and had satisfying moments as an astrophysicist in Alain Resnais’s Providence (1977), as well as in three films by Sam Peckinpah, The Ballad of Cable Hogue, Straw Dogs (in which he had his name expunged from the credits in a row over the size of his billing) and Cross of Iron.ĭavid Hattersley Warner was born in Manchester on July 29 1941, the son of Herbert, a Russian Jew who owned a nursing home, and Ada Hattersley. Success might have been sporadic, but he was lauded in neurotic-comic roles such as the failed artist in Karel Reisz’s Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment (1966) the trusting bombardier in Jack Gold’s The Bofors Gun (1968), and the crazy cultivator of psychedelic mushrooms in Hall’s Work is a Four-Letter Word the same year (from the Henry Livings stage fantasy Eh?, in which he had starred). None the less, if his talent seemed to some wasted, he found ready employment before the cameras, going on to amass more than 200 credits. Peter Hall considered Warner “potentially one of the greatest stage actors”, possessing “that authentic quality that makes you hang on to their every word, understand their every thought, note their merest gesture”. It’s all fun, and you get something out of it.” If the script comes through the letterbox I’ll do it. David Warner, the actor, who has died aged 80, was one of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s widely acclaimed discoveries of the Sixties in its heyday under Peter Hall tall, lean, gangling, long-faced, he triumphed first in one of Shakespeare’s least-known roles, Henry VI, which he brought to life in the RSC’s quatercentenary cycle, The Wars of the Roses, and again with a resolutely “contemporary” interpretation of Hamlet.īut within a decade of those early glories, which he achieved in his early twenties, Warner was drawn increasingly to the cinema – not that he took it as seriously as he had the classical stage, but as he said, when living in Los Angeles years later, “I am a letterbox actor.
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