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Ronald Lacey

Ronald Lacey built a career around the sort of face and voice filmmakers knew how to put to mischievous, sinister use. Born in Harrow on 28 September 1935, he attended Harrow Weald Grammar School, completed a brief period of national service and trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. His acting career began with the 1959 television play The Secret Agent, followed by a significant stage role in Chips with Everything at the Royal Court Theatre in 1962. Across the 1960s and 1970s, Lacey moved between theatre and British television, appearing in programmes including The Avengers, Department S and Porridge. He also took part in Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, playing the gravedigger in a recreation of the graveyard scene from Hamlet alongside Ian Richardson and Patrick Stewart. Lacey’s distinctive features, highly recognizable voice and ability to produce a piercing scream made him particularly well suited to characters who were cowardly, creepy, seedy or openly malicious. Yet his range was not confined to conventional villains. He played Dylan Thomas for BBC2 in a performance critic Clive James called “bravura,” and later performed comic monologues in The Green Tie on the Little Yellow Dog. By the late 1970s, disappointment with his career had led Lacey to consider opening a talent agency. Instead, Steven Spielberg cast him as Nazi agent Arnold Toht in Raiders of the Lost Ark, a role that put his gleaming, threatening smile to full effect. A run of further villains followed in Sahara, Flesh and Blood and Red Sonja. In Firefox, however, he played a Russian scientist secretly helping the West. Lacey could also turn his unusual screen presence toward more playful transformations. In Trenchcoat he appeared as Princess Aida, a mysterious drag queen in Malta, while Invitation to the Wedding gave him the dual role of a husband and wife. Whether comic, grotesque or menacing, his performances rarely felt anonymous.