Actor George Coulouris; Known for Villain Roles

George Coulouris, an English actor who played a series of devastatingly cruel villains both on stage and in films and who was an original member of Orson Welles’ fabled Mercury Theater, has died, his wife said Thursday.

He was 85 and died Tuesday of heart failure brought on by Parkinson’s disease, Elizabeth Coulouris said from their home in north London.

Coulouris, with his forbidding demeanor and menacing stare, played in more than 40 feature pictures, starting with “Christopher Bean” in 1933.

His other credits included “All This and Heaven Too,” “Assignment in Brittany,” “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” “Watch on the Rhine” (an Oscar nomination for supporting actor), “None But the Lonely Heart,” “Joan of Arc,” “King of Kings,” “Arabesque,” “Papillon,” “Murder on the Orient Express,” “Shout at the Devil” and many more.

He also was Walter Parks Thatcher, the financier-guardian of the young Charles Foster Kane, in Welles’ immortal “Citizen Kane.”

In writing of Coulouris’ work as gangster Jim Mordinoy in the 1944 film “None But the Lonely Heart,” New York Times critic Bosley Crowther called him “the very essence of cultivated wickedness.”

Born Oct. 1, 1903, to a Greek father and English mother in Salford, central England, Coulouris ran away from home to become an actor against his businessman father’s wishes.

He attended the prestigious Central School of Speech and Drama, studying with Peggy Ashcroft and Laurence Olivier.

He went to New York in 1929, landed his first major stage roles, and worked at the Mercury Theater in New York, later following Welles to Hollywood.

Perhaps his best-known evildoer was his portrayal of Teck de Brancovis, a blackmailer with Nazi connections in the 1943 film of Lillian Hellman’s “Watch on the Rhine.”

During World War II he became the pluperfect Nazi in several other films.

“I don’t think he thought of himself as someone who only worked as a villain,” Elizabeth Coulouris told the Associated Press. “But I don’t think he minded. He enjoyed it because he did it well.”

In the 1950s, Coulouris returned to England and continued playing a range of characters on stage, including Big Daddy in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” He once listed his favorite stage roles as Othello, Macbeth and King Lear.

In 1977 he appeared in Los Angeles as Lear, appearing for “expenses only,” he told an interviewer. “It gives me a chance once more to do Shakespeare and to spend some pleasant weeks in the Southern California sunshine.”