Paul Freeman

Paul Freeman has one of the most efficient villain entrances in cinema. As Rene Belloq in Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981 he walks in, takes what somebody else has just earned, and explains without ever raising his voice that he is simply better at this, and the film does not fully regain its balance until he is out of the frame. He was already an established English character actor by then, with The Long Good Friday and The Dogs of War both released in 1980.

What he does is manners. His antagonists tend to be better dressed, better spoken and more relaxed than whoever is opposing them, and the menace comes out of the courtesy rather than in spite of it. He was Professor Moriarty in Without a Clue in 1988, the wine baron Gustav Riebmann on the fourth season of Falcon Crest in the mid eighties, a Roman governor in Centurion in 2010, and, having evidently decided dignity was optional, the cackling purple villain Ivan Ooze in the 1995 Power Rangers film, which a generation of children found genuinely upsetting.

He has worked steadily for fifty years without ever headlining, from The Sweeney in the seventies through A World Apart in 1988, The Devil's Arithmetic in 1999, Hot Fuzz in 2007, Da Vinci's Demons in 2013 and Absentia in 2017, up to The Thursday Murder Club in 2025. Yesterday's Dreams in 1987 gave him a rare lead as Martin Daniels. It is a career built almost entirely on being the most civilised person in a room full of trouble.