Peter Cushing

Over six decades and more than a hundred films, Cushing built the most respectable career anybody has ever had in disreputable material. The early work is ordinary support: Osric in the 1948 Hamlet, Marcel de la Voisier in Moulin Rouge (1952), Memmon in Alexander the Great (1956).

Then The Curse of Frankenstein in 1957. His Baron Victor Frankenstein is the reason the Hammer horror cycle worked at all: he plays the monster of the piece as a courteous professional, brisk and faintly impatient, far more interested in the problem than in the corpse. He returned to the part five more times, across The Revenge of Frankenstein, The Evil of Frankenstein, Frankenstein Created Woman, Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed and Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell, and the character gets colder with every one.

The counterweight is Van Helsing, first in Dracula (1958) and later in The Brides of Dracula, Dracula A.D. 1972, The Satanic Rites of Dracula and The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires. He was also a fine Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959) and played Doctor Who in two Dalek features in 1965 and 1966. What holds all of it together is that he never signalled to the audience that any of it was silly, and he does the same precise, unhurried work in a single anthology segment as in a lead.

Star Wars (1977) handed him a second global audience as Grand Moff Tarkin, a performance built almost entirely out of stillness and contempt. The late credits are portmanteau horror and character parts, from Tales from the Crypt and Asylum to a joke turn in Top Secret! and a last appearance in Biggles. He died in 1994.