Sir Peter Ustinov, the Oscar-winning actor who later earned a reputation for his humanitarian work, has died. He was 82.
Ustinov died of heart failure late on Sunday night in a Swiss clinic at Genolier, near his home in Bursins in vineyards overlooking Lake Geneva, said close friend Leon Davico.
A person who answered the telephone at Ustinov’s home confirmed he had died, but declined to give further details.
”He was a great man. He a human being. He was a unique person, someone you could really count on,” Davico said.
Born in London on April 16 1921, the only son of a Russian artist mother and a journalist father, Ustinov claimed also to have Swiss, Ethiopian, Italian and French blood — everything except English.
His imposing figure, variously described as resembling a teddy bear, a giant panda or a Georgian frontage, began 5,4kg at birth and stayed with him throughout his career.
Ustinov was performing by the age of three, mimicking politicians of the day when his parents invited Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie for dinner.
He was educated at the prestigious Westminster School, but hated it and left at 16. He appeared in his first revue and had his first stage play presented in London in 1940, when he was 19.
Ustinov turned producer at 21 when he presented Squaring the Circle shortly before he entered the British army in 1942.
If his plays had a continuing theme, it was a celebration of the little man bucking the system.
One of his most successful was The Love of Four Colonels, which ran for two years in London’s West End. Davico, who was starting his career with the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef), asked Ustinov to join Unicef as a goodwill ambassdor after seeing the play.
”He was not just a writer and actor. He was someone who really tried to help,” Davico said. ”He was not only the funniest person person I’ve ever met, but the most intelligent. He was an attentive citizen of the world.”
Ustinov later became a staunch advocate for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation.
”He never said no to anything Unicef or the rest of United Nations asked him to do,” said Davico.
Davico said Ustinov recently attended a Unicef event despite being confined to a wheelchair — sciatica gave him trouble walking, and diabetes left him with 30% vision and foot problems.
Ustinov’s long service as a goodwill ambassador with the UN led the organisation’s Secretary General, Kofi Annan, to joke that Ustinov was the man to take over from him.
In a movie career lasting about 60 years, Ustinov appeared in roles ranging from Emperor Nero to Agatha Christie’s Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. He won Academy Awards for supporting actor in the films Spartacus and Topkapi in the 1960s.
More recently he was the voice of Babar the Elephant, played the role of a doctor in the film Lorenzo’s Oil, and in 1999 appeared as the Walrus to Pete Postlethwaite’s Carpenter in a multimillion-dollar TV movie version of Alice in Wonderland.
No immediate details on funeral arrangements were available. — Sapa-AP