The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (304 page)

In his time, he may be compared to Ricky Gervais, but Nighy—it seems to me—is superior, mysterious, sexy (for years he was Diana Quick’s companion) and private, and he leaves Gervais stranded as a mere upstart. Nighy wants things to improve; he dreams of recovery—and in Britain now that’s a tragic stance. The name rhymes with “sigh,” “die,” and “don’t bother to apply.”

He attended the Guildford School of Acting and was raised in Croydon, on the edge of south London (he attended the John Fisher school). From there he went into provincial theatre and in two years (in 1977) he opened the Cottesloe Theatre with
Illuminatus!
His other stage work includes
Pravda, A Map of the World
, and
Skylight
(all by David Hare), several Pinter productions, and Tom Stoppard’s
Arcadia
(1993), in which he played Bernard Nightingale, a fraudulent don and a key role in Nighy’s suspect pedigree.

He started out in movies in
Eye of the Needle
(81, Richard Marquand);
Curse of the Pink Panther
(83, Blake Edwards);
The Little Drummer Girl
(84, George Roy Hill);
Hitler’s SS: Portrait in Evil
(85, Jim Goddard);
Thirteen at Dinner
(85, Lou Antonio); as Meares in
The Last Place on Earth
(85, Ferdinand Fairfax).

He was in
The Phantom of the Opera
(89, Dwight H. Little);
Being Human
(93, Bill Forsyth);
FairyTale: A True Story
(97, Charles Sturridge);
Still Crazy
(98, Brian Gibson)—a first run as a rock singer;
Guest House Paradiso
(99, Ade Edmondson); a few episodes of
Kiss Me Kate
(99–00), a TV series;
Longitude
(00, Sturridge);
Blow Dry
(01, Paddy Breachnach);
Lawless Heart
(01, Neil Hunter);
Lucky Break
(01, Peter Cattaneo).

He got a lot of attention in the third season of the TV series
Auf Wiedersehen, Pet
(02), playing a corrupt local official, Jeffrey Grainger. In fact, he worked more effectively on TV and the stage than in movies, for while he was competent at playing a part his real talent lay in developing an insidious intimacy with real people. He was in
The Lost Prince
(03, Stephen Poliakoff), and then he was a big hit in
State of Play
(03, David Yates), as the newspaper editor. The same year, he was wild and wonderful as the has-been rock star in
Love Actually
(03, Richard Curtis), a performance that helped reveal his talent for manic physical exaggeration—there is a dancer in Bill Nighy, not a good dancer, but passionately clumsy.

It’s not a clear-cut career—he is all too ready to try anything. But he has developed a cult of followers, patient in calm and inertia, waiting for his piquant distress.
I Capture the Castle
(03, Tim Fywell);
Underworld
(03, Len Wiseman);
Shaun of the Dead
(04, Edgar Wright);
He Knew He Was Right
(TV) (04, Tom Vaughan);
Enduring Love
(04, Roger Michell); with Kelly Macdonald in the love story
The Girl in the Café
(05, Yates);
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
(05, Garth Jennings);
The Constant Gardener
(05, Fernando Meirelles); in two episodes of
Pirates of the Caribbean
(06 and 07, Gore Verbinski);
Notes on a Scandal
(06, Richard Eyre);
Stormbreaker
(06, Geoffrey Sax);
Valkyrie
(08, Bryan Singer); as the owner of the station in
Pirate Radio
(09, Curtis).

How about Nighy as the Duke of Windsor with Rupert Everett as Mrs. Simpson?

David Niven
(1910–83), b. Kirriemuir, Scotland
Remember all those robust actors hauling themselves up the cliff in
The Guns of Navarone
(61, J. Lee Thompson)? All pulling their weight except for David Niven, who looked too spruce for such effort. Yet Niven had served as a young man in the Highland Light Infantry and, during the Second World War, he was a major in the Commandos. It was an ingredient of his self-deprecating flavor of pink gins that he should seem implausible as a man of action, more suitably cast as the bogus major in
Separate Tables
(58, Delbert Mann), caught committing an indecent offense in a Bournemouth cinema. In fact, neither Niven’s actual vigor nor literary wit—he wrote a novel, as well as two funny autobiographies—properly carried across the screen. He preferred to seem brittle, unreliable, a man whose banter and charm occasionally crumbled to reveal inadequacy: that is the vein abused, if rewarded with an Oscar, in
Separate Tables
, and best displayed in the superb
Bonjour Tristesse
(58, Otto Preminger).

From the army, Niven went into lumberjacking and thence into cheap Westerns as an extra. Without any preliminaries in British cinema, in 1935, he was signed up by Goldwyn in what was a long and abrasive relationship. It was several years before he began to get proper parts:
Splendor
(35, Elliott Nugent);
Barbary Coast
(35, Howard Hawks);
Feather in Her Hat
(35, Alfred Santell);
Dodsworth
(36, William Wyler);
The Charge of the Light Brigade
(36, Michael Curtiz); as Fritz in
The Prisoner of Zenda
(37, John Cromwell);
Dinner at the Ritz
(37, Harold Schuster);
Beloved Enemy
(37, H. C. Potter); Scotty in
The Dawn Patrol
(38, Edmund Goulding);
Four Men and a Prayer
(38, John Ford);
Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife
(38, Ernst Lubitsch); as Edgar in
Wuthering Heights
(39), loathing Wyler’s endless retakes;
Bachelor Mother
(39, Garson Kanin);
The Real Glory
(39, Henry Hathaway);
Eternally Yours
(39, Tay Garnett); and
Raffles
(40, Sam Wood).

Niven returned to Britain for the war and made two pictures—
The First of the Few
(42, Leslie Howard) and
The Way Ahead
(44, Carol Reed)—between active service.

After the war, Niven was not quite as welcome in America and Goldwyn often loaned him away to Korda:
Magnificent Doll
(46, Frank Borzage);
The Perfect Marriage
(46, Lewis Allen); the pilot whose fate is judged in
A Matter of Life and Death
(46, Michael Powell);
The Other Love
(47, André de Toth);
The Bishop’s Wife
(47, Henry Koster);
Bonnie Prince Charlie
(48, Anthony Kimmins);
Enchantment
(48, Irving Reis);
A Kiss in the Dark
(48, Delmer Daves);
The Elusive Pimpernel
(50, Powell);
A Kiss for Corliss
(50, Richard Wallace);
Happy Go Lovely
(51, Bruce Humberstone);
Soldiers Three
(51, Garnett);
The Moon Is Blue
(53, Preminger);
Happy Ever After
(54, Mario Zampi);
Love Lottery
(54, Charles Crichton);
The King’s Thief
(55, Robert Z. Leonard);
Carrington V.C
. (56, Anthony Asquith); as Phileas Fogg, in a hurry but unflappable, in
Around the World in 80 Days
(56, Michael Anderson);
The Birds and the Bees
(56, Norman Taurog);
The Little Hut
(57, Mark Robson);
Oh Men! Oh Women!
(57, Nunnally Johnson);
My Man Godfrey
(57, Koster);
The Silken Affair
(57, Roy Kellino);
Ask Any Girl
(59, Charles Walters);
Happy Anniversary
(59, David Miller);
Please Don’t Eat the Daisies
(60, Walters);
Guns of Darkness
(62, Asquith);
The Best of Enemies
(62, Guy Hamilton); unusually observant as the British ambassador in
55 Days at Peking
(63, Nicholas Ray);
The Pink Panther
(64, Blake Edwards);
Bedtime Story
(64, Ralph Levy); and
Lady L
(65, Peter Ustinov).

He was consistent, cheery, good value, funny yet polite—an Englishman abroad, too well mannered to insist on being Scottish.

By then, he was made to resort to such nonsense that even his smile looked aghast:
Casino Royale
(67, John Huston);
The Impossible Years
(68, Michael Gordon);
Before Winter Comes
(68, Thompson);
The Extraordinary Seaman
(69, John Frankenheimer); and
Prudence and the Pill
(69, Fielder Cook). But he was close to Nabokov’s sense of elegant humiliation in
King, Queen, Knave
(72, Jerzy Skolimowski), and a charming Dracula in
Vampira
(74, Clive Donner). His real smile was based on the foresight he showed in 1953 by joining in the Four Star TV Theatre, a project that allowed him his greatest asset, calm.

His image as a laid-back elitist was strained by TV commercials for instant coffee—not so much deadpan as dead pot. Then he ventured out as a grandad for Disney in
No Deposit, No Return
(76, Norman Tokar), the title a comment on his involvement; a smoothie in
Murder by Death
(76, Robert Moore); an English butler for Disney in
Candleshoe
(77, Tokar).

His health was suffering, but he was in
Death on the Nile
(78, John Guillermin);
A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square
(79, Ralph Thomas);
Escape to Athena
(79, George Pan Cosmatos);
The Sea Wolves
(80, Andrew V. McLaglen);
Rough Cut
(80, Don Siegel);
Better Late Than Never
(82, Bryan Forbes);
Trail of the Pink Panther
(82, Edwards), and
Curse of the Pink Panther
(83, Edwards), for which his voice had to be dubbed by another actor.

Philippe Noiret
(1930–2006), b. Lille, France
For over forty years, Noiret has averaged three films a year. They are not all good, or explicable. He has had his fling in English-language films and done well enough. But he looks to American eyes like a character actor, damned by his own casual unobtrusiveness. He is akin to Robert Mitchum in that, after decades of professional assignment, very little fuss, and no large claim on grandeur, he emerges as one of the medium’s treasures, a man whose enormous versatility is managed almost without a trace and certainly without strain. One may list a few “greatest” performances—for Tavernier, Ferreri, or even in
Cinema Paradiso
—but really it is the body of work that is powerful. Past sixty now, Noiret can only mean more as he comes to his generation of “old man parts.”

The list cannot be complete, but it includes the major works, the films one would most like to see and those that deserve to be seen over and over:
Gigi
(48, Jacqueline Audry);
Olivia
(50, Audry);
Agence Matrimoniale
(53, Jean-Paul Le Chanois);
La Pointe Courte
(55, Agnes Varda); the transvestite uncle in
Zazie
(60, Louis Malle);
Le Rendezvous
(61, Jean Delannoy);
Tout l’Or du Monde
(61, René Clair); the husband in
Thérèse Desqueyroux
(62, George Franju); Louis XIII in
Cyrano et d’Artagnan
(64, Abel Gance);
Lady L
(65, Peter Ustinov);
La Vie de Chateau
(66, Jean-Paul Rappeneau);
Qui Êtes-Vous, Polly Magoo
(66, William Klein);
Tendre Voyou
(66, Jean Becker);
Les Sultans
(67, Delannoy);
The Night of the Generals
(67, Anatole Litvak);
L’Une et l’Autre
(67, René Allio);
Woman Times Seven
(67, Vittorio De Sica);
Alexandre le Bienheureux
(68, Yves Robert);
The Assassination Bureau
(69, Basil Dearden);
Mister Freedom
(69, Klein);
Justine
(69, George Cukor); and
Clérambard
(69, Robert).

Ambiguity was now so ingrained in his nature, it is to be regretted that he worked only once for Hitchcock in the flawed
Topaz
(70). Then he did
Les Caprices de Marie
(70, Philippe de Broca);
A Time for Loving
(71, Christopher Miles);
Les Aveux les Plus Doux
(71, Edouard Molinaro);
Murphy’s War
(71, Peter Yates);
La Mandarine
(72, Molinaro); as the TV producer in
L’Attempt
(72, Yves Boisset);
Le Serpent
(73, Henri Verneuil);
La Grande Bouffe
(73, Marco Ferreri);
Touche Pas la Femme Blanche
(74, Ferreri); hunched and quiet as the father in
The Watchmaker
(74, Bertrand Tavernier);
Le Secret
(74, Robert Enrico);
Le Jeu avec le Feu
(75, Alain Robbe-Grillet); as Philippe of Orleans, extrovert and upstanding in
Let Joy Reign Supreme
(75, Tavernier); as the man who seeks vengeance against the Nazis in
Le Vieux Fusil
(75, Enrico);
Amici Mei
(76, Mario Monicelli); the judge in
The Judge and the Assassin
(76, Tavernier);
Coup de Foudre
(76, Enrico);
Tendre Poulet
(78, de Broca);
Le Témoin
(78, Jean-Pierre Mocky);
Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?
(78, Ted Kotcheff);
Un Taxi Mauve
(78, Boisset);
A Leap into the Void
(79, Marco Bellocchio); and
Deathwatch
(79, Tavernier).

On a Volé la Cuisse de Jupiter
(80, de Broca);
A Week’s Vacation
(80, Tavernier);
Pile ou Face
(80, Enrico);
Three Brothers
(81, Francesco Rosi); as the Jim Thompson sheriff from
Pop. 1280
transferred to French West Africa in
Coup de Torchon
(81, Tavernier);
Fort Saganne
(84, Alain Corneau);
Le Cop
(84, Claude Zidi);
L’Été Prochain
(85, Nadine Trintignant);
Speriamo Che Sia Femmina
(85, Monicelli);
Masques
(87, Claude Chabrol); as a homosexual in
Gli Occhiali Ora
(87, Giuliano Montaldo);
La Famiglia
(87, Ettore Scola);
Young Toscanini
(88, Franco Zeffirelli);
Cinema Paradiso
(89, Giuseppe Tornatore); outstanding as the major who clerks for the dead in
Life and Nothing But
(89, Tavernier);
Faux et Usage de Faux
(89, Laurent Heynemann);
Ripoux Contre Ripoux: Le Cop 2
(89, Zidi);
Di Menticare Palermo
(90, Rosi);
Uranus
(90, Claude Berri);
J’Embrasse Pas
(91, André Téchiné);
Max et Jeremie
(92, Claire Devers); and
Tango
(93, Patrice Leconte).