Ian Bannen; British Movie, TV, Stage Actor

Ian Bannen, the venerable British actor who capped his long and productive career as an elderly Irish con artist in the sleeper hit film “Waking Ned Devine,” died Wednesday in a car accident. He was 71.

Bannen’s body was found in the passenger seat of an overturned car near Loch Ness in his native Scotland, officials said. The unidentified woman driver was hospitalized.

A leading actor in his youth who matured into memorable character parts, Bannen was nominated for an Academy Award for his role in the 1965 “The Flight of the Phoenix.” He played the cynical Crow, among a group of men marooned when their plane crashed in the Sahara.

He celebrated becoming a septuagenarian with a latter-day star turn (and a nude scene) along with actor David Kelly in the Irish romp “Waking Ned Devine.” With Kelly as his timid and reluctant accomplice, Bannen as Jackie O’Shea brashly schemed to befriend the winner of the Irish lottery and share the pot. As it turns out, O’Shea, admittedly “not a great man for telling things the way they are,” has to connive even more to collect Devine’s winning lottery ticket for the small town of Tully More (population 52) after the shock of winning causes Devine to die of a heart attack.

The film earned Bannen and Kelly a joint Golden Satellite for best actor in a motion picture musical or comedy and the delighted admiration of audiences on both sides of the Atlantic.

“All the actors in ‘Waking Ned’ are smooth and practiced performers who inhabit these roles like they’ve lived them all their lives. But few can touch stars Bannen and Kelly,” commented Times film critic Kenneth Turan when the movie opened in Los Angeles Nov. 20, 1998. “Playing off each other beautifully, with a lifetime of skills in their every move, they create a charming comedy of winks and nods that is inescapably engaging.”

Bannen clearly enjoyed making the film, agreeing with Kelly that actors should never retire because they would be bored literally to death. As for his own opinion of the finished “Ned,” Bannen told The Times proudly: “It’s a kisser.”

On the silver screen, Bannen played a leper in Mel Gibson’s “Braveheart” and had key supporting roles in “Hope and Glory,” “Gorky Park,” “Eye of the Needle,” “Gandhi,” “A Tale of Two Cities,” “Macbeth” and “Bite the Bullet.” He made his film debut in two 1956 British films, “Private’s Progress” and “Battle Hell.”

On television, Bannen was often seen by Americans on the Arts & Entertainment cable channel, the NBC “Hallmark Hall of Fame” and PBS’ “Masterpiece Theater,” where he played the older Dr. Cameron in the 1994 “Dr. Finlay” two-parter. A Times reviewer noted that the wedding dinner of Finlay’s housekeeper (Annette Crosbie), “when she and Bannen have one last dance amid whiskey and bagpipes, is the show’s jeweled crescent.”

Bannen’s other television work included the “Perry Mason” series on NBC, a PBS docudrama last year, “The Treaty,” detailing the signing of the Anglo-Irish treaty in 1921, and such classic television productions as “Uncle Vanya,” “The Politician’s Wife,” “Doctor Jekyll & Mr. Hyde” “Johnny Belinda” and “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.” In the early 1970s, a less portly Bannen played the leading roles of St. John Rivers in the television movie “Jane Eyre” and Adolf Hitler in “The Gathering Storm.”

Born in Airdrie, Scotland, Bannen attended Ratcliffe College in Leicester, England, and served as a corporal in the British army during World War II.

He established his acting career on the legitimate stage in Ireland, after making his debut in Dublin’s Gate Theater in “Armlet of Jade” in 1947.

Less than a decade later, Bannen was acting in London, and made his debut in the city’s West End, equivalent to New York’s Broadway, in 1956. The play was Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge.”

But Bannen quickly became known in England for his work in the plays of Eugene O’Neill, and later Shakespeare when he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-on-Avon. He had memorable roles in O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh,” “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” and “A Moon for the Misbegotten” and Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” “As You Like It,” “Romeo and Juliet” and “Othello.”

Bannen also was a professional photographer.

He is survived by his wife of 21 years, the former Marilyn Salisbury.