Herbert Lom

Herbert Lom built a sixty-year career out of being the most composed person in the room. A Czech actor who lived from 1917 to 2012 and worked mostly in Britain, he was cast young as criminals and elegant villains, largely on the strength of a cool manner and a very precise way with a line, and later as doctors, professors and noblemen, once those same qualities read as authority rather than threat.

The early evidence is strong. Kristo, the wrestling promoter who owns half of London in Night and the City in 1950. Louis in The Ladykillers, the one member of the gang with no comic softness anywhere in him. Napoleon in War and Peace in 1956, Tigranes in Spartacus, Ben Yussuf in El Cid, Captain Nemo in Mysterious Island in 1961.

Then came Dreyfus. Across seven Pink Panther films between 1964 and 1993, Lom played a competent policeman being dismantled, one meeting at a time, by a colleague too stupid to notice what he was doing. It is superb physical comedy and it swallowed his reputation whole, which is the standard fate of anyone who is the funniest element in a franchise.

The best of the later work sits elsewhere. Dr. Sam Weizak in The Dead Zone in 1983 is warm, plain and completely serious, the kind of part he could have played for the remainder of his career if the industry had thought of him that way. Around it are horror pictures, Count Dracula, Asylum, And Now the Screaming Starts, and a long run of international adventure films: Gambit, Hopscotch, King Solomon's Mines, And Then There Were None.