No one who saw Clive Revill, who has died aged 94, on stage or screen thought he was anything less than a superb actor. However, for one who enjoyed such a distinguished career, he was surprisingly little known to the general public. It was as though he operated under the radar. He was twice nominated for a Tony award on Broadway, worked three times in startlingly different productions with the great stage director Peter Brook, and twice with the film director Billy Wilder.
But his career did not gather momentum once he moved to Los Angeles in the late 1970s, and his last major Broadway appearance, as a “weirdly colourful” (according to one critic) nemesis to Donald Sutherland’s professor in an Edward Albee adaptation of Nabokov’s Lolita in 1980, was commercially disastrous.
