MICHAEL LONSDALE

(24 May 1931 - 21 September 2020)

The Anglo-French actor Michael Lonsdale, who has died aged 89, was born Michael Edward Lonsdale-Crouch to an English father and French-Irish mother. He grew up in London, the Channel Islands and Morocco. At sixteen he took art classes but then turned to acting. His first film was Michel Boisrond’s It Happened in Athens (1956) and he continued working in shorts, on TV and features such as Michel Deville’s Adorable Menteuse with Marina Vlady, The Immoral Moment with Maurice Ronet, and Jean-Pierre Mocky’s satirical comedies Snobs!, Order of the Daisy and The Stud. Orson Welles cast him in The Trial, based on Kafka, and he was in Fred Zinnemann’s Behold a Pale Horse. Lonsdale mainly worked in France in films, on TV and in the theatre and in London played in Beckett and Marguerite Duras at the Royal Court. He appeared in Renḗ Clḗment’s Is Paris Burning? and in Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black and Stolen Kisses. Duras directed him in Destroy, She Said and India Song, Louis Malle cast him in Le souffle au Coeur and Jacques Rivette included him in his two epics Out 1 and Out 1: Spectre.

Michael Lonsdale’s international break came with Fred Zinnemann’s The Day of the Jackal as an inspector after a potential assassin of De Gaulle. This was followed by Alain Resnais’ Stavisky, Luis Buñuel’s The Phantom of Liberty, and a trio of Joseph Losey titles, Galileo, The Romantic Englishwoman and Mr Klein. He played the villainous Hugo Drax in the Bond film Moonraker and appeared in Chariots of Fire. He was in the TV series Smiley’s People and with Michael Caine in The Holcroft Covenant. He did The Name of the Rose, James Ivory’s The Remains of the Day and Jefferson in Paris, Steven Spielberg’s Munich and Milos Forman’s Goya’s Ghosts. Of the 250 productions he graced, his favourite was Marguerite Duras’ India Song, with Delphine Seyrig, the woman he would like to have married... but he stayed single.

MICHAEL DARVELL