THE GUARDIAN
Friday April 28 1989

Obituary: George Coulouris

An elegant Villainy

GEORGE Coulouris was an actor of some force specialising in villains, particularly in his film roles, but quite able for nobler parts (he is shown in our picture in rehearsal as General Sikorski in the London production of Rolf Hochhuth's play Soldiers).

Among the major feature films he appeared in were Citizen Kane, For Whom The Bell Tolls, I Accuse!, Papillon and Murder On The Orient Express. But the film which established him as an interesting and reliable heavy, with his massive shoulders and hooded eyes, was The Watch On The Rhine in 1943. (Brooks Atkinson, reviewing the Broadway production of Lilian Hellman's play on which it was based, noted Coulouris's "lucid and subtly repelling performance" as the Romanian Nazi fellow-traveller and blackmailer de Brancovis.)

He could be grand as well as heavy. and with his height, rich voice and English accent was steadily in demand for the kind of upper-crust villain role Hollywood had a taste for. However, he was born in Salford, the son, as he wrote in a lively and feeling memoir in the Guardian three years ago, of "a gutsy little Greek who was not satisfied to starve in a little mountain village in the Pelopponesos but made a zig-zag way which ended him up running The King's Restaurant, Trafford Road. Salford."

Living 'above the shop' opposite No 8 Dock Gate was no berth for sensitive plants, and George was relieved, after winning a place at Manchester Grammar School, when he was able to persuade his parents to move to a villa in Urmston. "All my life till I left home", he wrote so many years later, "I was called a dirty dago, a greasy Greek. asked why I didn't go back where I came from." When his father sold the restaurant and worked up a business by dealing in all the junk that ships brought in from the sea, George joined him for a time in the office. But his head was full of Shakespeare, novels, music and bitter resentment that his father wouldn't let him read history at the university, and eventually he ran away from home.

His first role as a runaway was as a waiter on the liner Majestic, but he applied for and got a place at the Central School of Speech and Drama, studying with Olivier and Peggy Ashcroft. In 1926 he began on the London stage in a Shakespeare season with Charles Laughton at the Old Vic, and got noticed the following year in the part of Yank in Eugene O'Neill's The Hairy Ape.

He went to New York in 1929, appearing first in Shaw's The Apple Cart in a Theatre Guild production. Thereafter he was fairly regularly in work, but the next milestone in his burgeoning career occurred when he was playing in a piece called Ten Million Ghosts, and met an actor called Orson Welles. They got on well, and he joined Welles's Mercury Theatre, playing Mark Antony in the famous modern dress production of Julius Caesar in 1937. When Welles went to Hollywood to make Citizen Kane, Coulouris climbed into movie history in the part of Walter Parks Thatcher. By that time his future as a cinema actor was assured.

W.L.Webb

George Coulouris, born Salford, October 1, 1903; died Hampstead April 25