Ronald Pickup
Ronald Pickup is an actor, born 1940.
Pickup was a stage actor first and, by most accounts, foremost. The critic Michael Billington called him a terrific stage star and an essential member of Laurence Olivier's National Theatre company, and that single sentence explains the shape of the screen career: a very long line of precise supporting work, taken between plays, done properly and without fuss.
It began in 1964 with an episode of Doctor Who, and the credits here run from a 1965 BBC Play of the Month to The Happy Prince in 2018. Along the way: the Forger in The Day of the Jackal; Barrymore in the 1984 Sherlock Holmes series and again in its 1988 Hound of the Baskervilles; Hontar in The Mission; Prince John in Ivanhoe; Louw in A Dry White Season; the voice of Aslan in the 1988 Chronicles of Narnia and The Silver Chair.
His screen leads were on television, in the title role of The Life of Verdi and as Prince Yakimov in Fortunes of War, and neither is easy to see now, which is the usual fate of the era's best British television.
The late run is the one most people have actually watched. Norman Cousins in both Best Exotic Marigold Hotel films gave him a comic register he had rarely been asked for, and Neville Chamberlain in Darkest Hour gave him a historical figure he could play as a tired man rather than a symbol. He died in 2021, having spent more than fifty years being the best thing in scenes other actors were headlining.
Movies (29)
- Lolita (1997)
- Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010)
- Darkest Hour (2017)
- Never Say Never Again (1983)
- The Day of the Jackal (1973)
- The Mission (1986)
- Dark Floors (2008)
- The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2012)
- Ivanhoe (1982)
- The Fourth Protocol (1987)
- Evilenko (2004)
- Zulu Dawn (1979)
- A Dry White Season (1989)
- The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2015)
- The Hound of the Baskervilles (1988)
- The Thirty Nine Steps (1978)
- The Happy Prince (2018)
- Schadenfreude (2025)
- The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey (2007)
- The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Part 3: From Sark to the Finish (2005)
- Eleni (1985)
- A Life in Suitcases: A History of Tulse Luper (2005)
- Jekyll & Hyde (1990)
- The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Part 1: The Moab Story (2003)
- Supernova (2005)
- Camille (1984)
- Journey of Honor (1991)
- Mahler (1974)
- The Chronicles of Narnia: The Silver Chair (1990)
TV (17)
- BBC Play of the Month (1965)
- Sherlock Holmes (1984)
- Hustle (2004)
- The Inspector Lynley Mysteries (2002)
- Lark Rise to Candleford (2008)
- Performance (1991)
- Atlantis (2013)
- BBC2 Play of the Week (1977)
- The Chronicles of Narnia (1988)
- The Jury (2002)
- Scarlett (1994)
- Father Brown (1974)
- Sea of Souls (2004)
- Murder Rooms: The Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes (2001)
- Fortunes of War (1987)
- Pramface (2012)
- Cambridge Spies (2003)
Where to start with Ronald Pickup
The Day of the Jackal is the place to start, and it is a short assignment. He plays the Forger, and the scene shows exactly how much character an actor can build out of pure procedure: a small room, a set of tools and a man who is very good at something illegal.
The Mission and A Dry White Season are the serious films around him, both using his particular quality of dry institutional authority. Fortunes of War is the television lead worth chasing down. Then the late comedies: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is genuinely charming and he is a real part of why, with The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel if you want more. Darkest Hour hands him Chamberlain, played small and exhausted and considerably better than the film required. The Chronicles of Narnia is for anyone who grew up with that voice coming out of a lion.