George Murcell

Arthur George Murcell 30 October 1925 3 December 1998 was a British character actor Born in Italy he made his film debut in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburgers The Battle of the River Plate 1956 Murcell went on to develop a career playing snarling villains in both film and television These could either be stupid brutish henchmen as in Hell Drivers and Campbells Kingdom both 1957 or sophisticated rogues such as Needle in You Have Just Been Murdered an episode of The Avengers He specialised in playing foreign characters including Germans Russians and South Americans A number of these roles were in ITC adventure TV series of the 1960s and 1970s such as Danger Man The Baron The Saint The Champions Reply Box No666 episode 1967 Randall and Hopkirk Deceased The Persuaders and Jason King His film roles included Sea of Sand 1958 The Fall of the Roman Empire 1964 The Heroes of Telemark 1965 Kaleidoscope 1966 The Fixer 1968 A Dandy in Aspic 1968 The Assassination Bureau 1969 A Walk with Love and Death 1969 Penny Gold 1973 Special Branch 1974 Inside the Third Reich 1982 as Hermann Göring Year of the Gun 1991 and Cutthroat Island 1995 He enjoyed a long stage career which involved working with Tyrone Guthrie and Peter Brook and was active in the Royal Shakespeare CompanyIn the 1970s he acquired a Victorian church in North London which he converted into an Elizabethanstyle theatre in collaboration with director Adrian Brown In 1973 he opened it as St Georges Theatre intending that it present littleseen classical plays Throughout the 1970s and 1980s he continued to work at St Georges Theatre as both an actor and a director often with his wife Elvi Hale