Donald Pleasence; Actor Played Wide Range of Roles

Donald Pleasence, who seemed equally adept at playing craven cowards, querulous tramps and steely-eyed villains in a steady stream of film, television and theater roles that ranged over five decades, died Thursday.

His agent, Tessa Sutherland, said the actor, who had surgery to replace a heart valve shortly before Christmas, died at his home at St. Paul de Vence in the south of France. He was 75.

“It was very unexpected. We talked to him last night and he seemed well,” Sutherland told the Associated Press. She did not know the cause of death.

Although Pleasence began his career on the stage portraying classic characters, he became famous only after he began being seen as psychos, madmen bent on destroying the world--or piteous characters at the mercy of those villainous types.

“I tossed away my toupee,” said the bald actor to a Times interviewer in 1987, and “entered the beady-eyed business.”

Pleasence’s gleaming pate and furtive manner became his trademarks for most of his later career.

He won international kudos for his early portrayal of the wheedling tramp in Harold Pinter’s “The Caretaker,” while sending serious critics into fits of despair as the doctor trying to treat the slasher in the “Halloween” movies.

His other film roles ranged from James Bond’s adversary Blofeld in “You Only Live Twice,” to the crazed preacher who burned down Charlton Heston’s Christmas tree in “Will Penny.”

“I only make odd films,” the actor told the Times of London in 1983.

Born in the central English town of Worksop, Pleasence grew up in Sheffield, a poor industrial city.

When he was 18 he left his first job as a railway station clerk, telling his supervisor he was going to be an actor.

Lacking any formal training, he joined one of England’s many repertory companies, making his stage debut at the Playhouse, Jersey, in May, 1939, with a performance as Hareton in “Wuthering Heights.”

His first appearance on the London stage was as Valentine in “Twelfth Night” at the Arts Theater in June, 1942.

He served with the Royal Air Force during World War II and was shot down in 1944, spending the last year of the war in a German prison camp. Twenty years later, he starred in the classic POW movie “The Great Escape.”

After the war, he auditioned for director Peter Brook and got a part in a stage adaptation of “The Brothers Karamazov” with Alec Guinness, with whom he would later star in Jean Paul Sartre’s “Huis Clos.”

In 1951, Pleasence made his New York stage debut with Laurence Olivier’s company in “Caesar and Cleopatra” and “Antony and Cleopatra” at the Ziegfeld Theater.

His later stage performances included a season at Stratford-upon-Avon, playing the outsiders Launcelot Gobbo in “The Merchant of Venice” and Gumio in “The Taming of the Shrew.”

In 1960, Pleasence won what up to then was his highest acclaim for his performance as the malodorous tramp Davies in “The Caretaker,” winning the London Critics Award. He repeated the role to more praise on Broadway the next year and reprised it in London in 1991.He also played the role in a 1964 film.

*

As Arthur Goldman in “The Man in the Glass Booth” in 1967, he won the London Variety Award for stage actor of the year.

His other films include “The Greatest Story Ever Told” (as the devil), “A Tale of Two Cities,” “Look Back in Anger” and “Soldier Blue.”

In 1991, he made his first French-dialogue film, “Dien Bien Phu,” a biting examination of the legacy of French colonialism in Vietnam.

He also appeared in dozens of television plays including “The Barchester Chronicles,” “The Millionairess” and “Call Me Daddy,” for which he won an Emmy. He was named British television actor of the year in 1958.

In 1960, he produced a series of TV dramas, “Armchair Mystery Theater.”

In 1984, Great Britain made him an officer of the Order of the British Empire.

Pleasence--who said his favorite pastime was “talking too much”--had a large following despite his association with unsavory characters.

“I’m a kind of lovable figure, really,” he told the Times of London. “I’m loved by middle-aged women. When men stop me in the street for my autograph it’s always for their wives, who must be about 50.”

He is survived by his fourth wife, Linda, and six daughters.