LEE MONTAGUE

(16 October 1927 - 30 March 2025)

A classical actor who often played villains, Lee Montague, who has died at the age of 97, was constantly working in films, theatre and television in a very long career. He may often have played strong characters but he invariably exuded a charismatic charm. He was born Leonard Goldberg in Bow, in East London, to a Jewish family from Slavic stock. His father was a tailor, his mother from Lithuania. Lee was one of the first students at the Old Vic Theatre School when it reopened after World War II and he was cast in productions at the theatre from 1950. He toured Europe with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh in Titus Andronicus and appeared in other Shakespeare productions. He also worked with the Bristol Old Vic and the Royal Shakespeare Company.

In New York he played Ed in Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane and at the Royal Exchange in Manchester he was Mr Antrobus in Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth and Dr Prentice in Orton’s What the Butler Saw, among others. In the West End he played Ambrose Kemper in Wilder’s The Matchmaker – before it became Hello, Dolly! – with Ruth Gordon, and he was Rocky in Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh.

For cinema and television Montague was enormously prolific, notching up nearly 150 roles, beginning with John Huston’s Moulin Rouge in 1952, followed by Another Sky, Gavin Lambert’s quirky tale of a woman’s search for emotional release in North Africa. Over the years he covered every genre with cinema credits including The Silent Enemy The Camp on Blood Island and Deadlier Than the Male, thrillers such as Blind Date, Operation Snatch, Nobody Runs Forever, The Spy Killer and some historical subjects such as Peter Ustinov’s Billy Budd, Franco Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth (as the prophet Habakkuk) and Brother Sun, Sister Moon (as the father of Francis of Assisi), Red Monarch (as Stalin), Pope John Paul II (as the Soviet general Ivan Konev), and Eagle in a Cage, biographical studies of Gustav Mahler (as the composer’s father), Lady Jane (as Simon Renard, the Spanish Ambassador) and Brass Target (as Lucky Luciano). He worked in comedies, too, including Richard Lester’s How I Won the War with Michael Crawford and John Lennon, The Best Pair of Legs in the Business, Comedy Playhouse and The Dick Emery Show.

Montague covered a whole world of nationalities and was called on to play Germans, Russians, Chinese, Japanese, Arabs, Mexicans, Hungarians, Spanish, Greeks and even an Inuit in The Savage Innocents. On television he ran the gamut of characterizations in the likes of The Sweeney, Minder, Department S, Space 1999, The Baron, Bergerac, Casualty, Dempsey and Makepeace, Dixon of Dock Green and many others. He was also the first narrator on the BBC’s children’s story programme Jackanory, in 1965.

Lee Montague married the actress Ruth Goring in 1955 and they had two children. Ruth died in 2023.

MICHAEL DARVELL