Leonardo Di Caprio – Blood and Porridge

August 2, 2025

James Bond Island

© Eon Productions / United Artists

A while ago, my partner and I holidayed in the town of Khao Lak, 60 kilometres from the southeastern Thai resort of Phuket. We saw a brochure for a boat tour in the nearby Ao Phang Nga National Park, which encompasses a large, island-strewn bay in the Andaman Sea. Among the islands visited by the tour was Khao Phing Kan, a location used during the filming of the 1974 James Bond film, The Man with the Golden Gun. It’s now popularly known as ‘James Bond Island’.

Regular readers of this blog will know I’m a connoisseur of all things Bond-related, especially the movies and the original books written by Ian Fleming. So, could I resist an opportunity to visit James Bond island? Of course not.

Not, I should add, that I’m a fan of The Man with the Golden Gun. I think it’s one of the worst films in the Bond franchise. It has Roger Moore in the main role, in only his second outing as 007 but already looking tired – you’re already waiting impatiently for him to regenerate into Timothy Dalton. It has Britt Ekland, required to fill out a bikini but not to do any acting. It has Hervé Villechaize as diminutive henchman Nick Nack (“Dom Perignon soixante-quatre…”) – according to Moore, Villechaize was a lecherous wee pain-in-the-neck in real life. It has Clifton James as redneck comedy-relief American policeman Sheriff Pepper, who happens to be holidaying in Asia when he bumps into Bond – he refuses to have his picture taken with a local elephant, telling Mrs. Pepper: “We’re Demy-crats, Maybelle!” Democrats? That’s a surprise. And it has Lulu hollering the inuendo-riddled theme song: “He’s got a powerful weapon / He charges a million a shot!”

In fact, there are only two good things in The Man with the Golden Gun. One is its villain, the impeccable Christopher Lee as the super-hitman Francisco Scaramanga: “Come, come, Mr. Bond. You disappoint me. You get as much fulfilment out of killing as I do, so why don’t you admit it?” The other is the spectacular scenery. Scaramanga’s island hideaway is supposed to be in waters belonging to ‘Red China’, but the sequence where Bond approaches it in a seaplane was filmed in Ao Phang Nga National Park, with Khao Phing Kan standing in for Scaramanga HQ.

Even if I had hated James Bond Island, the boat trip out to it, which first involved traversing a warren of creeks with mangrove trees cramming their sides, and then passing some of the bay’s islands – giant, towering rocks, their summits and all but their steepest slopes cloaked tightly in trees – was enough to make the day worthwhile. Those islands, which’d looked pretty spectacular during The Man with the Golden Gun’s airborne scenes, with the cameras tracking Bond’s seaplane, seemed absolutely awesome when I was looking up at them from sea-level. Among the things I compared the fantastic shapes of these islands to in my notebook entries that day were: ‘fangs’, ‘ruined, vegetation-shrouded fortresses’, ‘herds of grazing prehistoric beasts’, ‘monstrous haystacks’, ‘mossy tombstones’ and ‘giant standing stones’. We passed one vaguely curved island with curious round protuberances on either side, like ears. Our guide said it was nicknamed ‘The Dog’.

As it turned out, we spent just 25 minutes on James Bond Island, which felt an adequate length of time. It was very busy with tourists. We guessed as much when we approached it and saw the great number of long boats, with varnished hulls and club-shaped bows, lined along its landing area. If Scaramanga was around today, he’d be erecting angry signs saying GET OFF MY LAND in response to the hordes of visitors. Maybe even firing volleys of his legendary golden bullets at the trespassers.

Despite the crowds, I was delighted to see Ko Ta Pu, the 20-foot-high, precarious-looking limestone rock that stands off the island’s shore and is shaped like an extracted tooth. In The Man with the Golden Gun, Scaramanga – who, unconvincingly, is depicted as a pioneer of green energy as well as a deadly hitman – has solar panels extend up from the top of Ko Ta Pu and collect enough sun’s energy to power an energy-beam gun, with which he destroys Bond’s seaplane. Getting a photo of this remarkable stub of rock was difficult, with so many people posing for selfies in front of it. But I managed in the end.

The island’s other striking feature is a huge, triangular opening behind the main beach, caused by seismic action. A giant slab of rock apparently broke free and ended up tilting steeply against the rest of the rock-mass there. Beneath it, looking up at its bulk and angles, you have a lurking fear it could topple the rest of the way and pulverize everything below, you included. It was here that we incurred the wrath of a large, bikinied and ignorant Western woman who’d been posing lasciviously for multiple photos in front of the formation and didn’t appreciate us strolling into her camera-frame.

As well as being infested with tourists, the island’s main beach was infested with stalls selling tourist tat. I was disappointed that no 007-themed merchandise was on sale – not even replicas of Christopher Lee’s golden gun. I guess then-Bond-producers Cubby Broccoli and Albert Saltzman refused to license the Bond brand to the Thai tourist authorities and the vendors here could sell only generic, er, nick-nacks… Weirdly, one Western-movie item that was on sale were figurines of Groot, the tree-like creature that features in the Guardians of the Galaxy (2014-23) movies. That’s because if you look at Ko Ta Pu long enough, you begin to see its resemblance to the head of Groot.

In fact, Khao Phing Kan, James Bond Island, wasn’t the only movie-connected island we visited in the Andaman Sea. A few days later, we went on a second boat trip, this time to the Phi-Phi-Phi Islands south of Ao Phang Nga National Park. One of the stops we made there was at Ko Phi Phi Lee, home to the now-famous Maya Bay.

© Figment Films / 20^th Century Fox

This was where in 2000 Danny Boyle filmed The Beach, based on the 1996 novel of the same name by Alex Garland. This movie was troubled in a couple of different ways. Originally, Ewan McGregor was lined up to star in it but, to his disgust, he was ultimately passed over in favour of Leonardo DiCaprio, then seen as a much more bankable actor because he’d played the hero in James Cameron’s world-beating Titanic (1998). This led to McGregor falling out with Boyle and the pair didn’t talk to each other for many years afterwards. More seriously, it was alleged that during production the filmmakers caused serious damage to Maya Beach’s ecosystems by ‘landscaping’ – i.e., bulldozering – part of it to make it more ‘paradise-like’.

We arrived at the northern side of Ko Phi Phi Lee and disembarked onto a precariously swaying, floating quay. Then, filing along a slightly elevated wooden walkway – no doubt there to prevent the sand, soil, rocks and plants being pulverized under the feet of countless visitors – we made our way into the island’s interior. The walkway was divided into two narrow lanes, with tourists streaming along in both directions. It arrived at a wider wooden platform in the middle of the island, where there were facilities such as toilets, souvenir stalls and eateries and where you could step down onto the surrounding ground. Two further walkways bifurcated off on its far side, both leading to the bay. We followed the slightly less busy one.

Maya Bay itself was certainly picturesque, its white sand and turquoise water encircled by high cliffs and crags. But it swarmed with the inevitable tourists, taking the inevitable photos and selfies. Our guide told us we should visit it at the time of Chinese New Year. Then, apparently, it gets really busy.

Although The Beach received middling reviews, it was reasonably successful – enough for it to cause the heavy tourist traffic to Ko Phi Phi Lee and Maya Beach. Things got so bad that in 2018 the Thai government banned all tourists from it, so that work could be done to restore its now-shattered environment. It wasn’t reopened to visitors until 2022, at the tail-end of the Covid-19 pandemic. Tour groups, like ours, are allowed only an hour on the island, and it also gets a two-month, tourist-free breather every year, from August 1^st to October 1^st.

This makes me wonder what would have happened if Danny Boyle had made The Beach with Ewan McGregor, rather less of a draw than Leonardo DiCaprio. (Sorry, Ewan.) It would have meant: (1) a less successful film, seen by fewer people; (2) fewer tourists flocking to Maya Bay, which would have put it under less environmental strain; and (3) Trainspotting 2 (2017) being made years earlier than it was, because Boyle and McGregor would never have fallen out and then needed ages to make up. Win-win all round, I’d say.

January 8, 2022January 9, 2022

Don’t Look Up is worth looking up

© Netflix / Hyperobject Industries

Before I start, a warning – many spoilers ahead!

Appropriately for a year that was fairly grim, the final movie I watched in 2021 was the recently released, apocalyptic sci-fi satire Don’t Look Up, which tells the story of how two astronomers (Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence) discover a comet hurtling on a course that in six months’ time will bring it smashing into the earth and wiping out all life here. But their warnings about what’s coming are muffled by a trivia-obsessed media, chiefly represented by fatuous talk show hosts Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry, which refuses to take them seriously. They’re also thwarted by duplicitous politicians, most notably Meryl Streep as the American president, who are reluctant to take decisive action and blow the damned comet out of the sky because, it transpires, it’s loaded with priceless minerals.

Don’t Look Up is interesting in that while it enjoys a healthy 7.3 / 10 approval rating from users of the online film database IMDb, and an even healthier ’82% liked this film’ rating among Google users, the reviews by film critics have been less enthusiastic – approval ratings of 54% and 50% on the critical aggregates Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic respectively. Among those unimpressed critics were the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, who called it ‘laboured, self-conscious and unrelaxed’, and Rolling Stone’s David Fear, who described it as ‘a righteous two-hour lecture masquerading as a satire’. Meanwhile, in the Independent, Louis Chilton went the whole hog and penned an article entitled WHAT GOES UP, MUST COME DOWN: WHY IT’S OKAY TO HATE ‘DON’T LOOK UP’. In this, he opined, “the execution is too broad and condescending… And for a comedy, perhaps its greatest offence is that there are almost no laughs.”

So Don’t Look Up has received contrasting levels of appreciation from ordinary viewers and from the critics. Interestingly, one faction that’s whole-heartedly praised the film has been environmental journalists and scientists. Climate scientist Peter Kalmus wrote in the Guardian that as someone “doing everything I can to wake people up and avoid planetary destruction, it’s also the most accurate film about society’s terrifying non-response to climate breakdown I’ve seen.” Meanwhile, in the Guardian too, environmental journalist George Monbiot declared, “The movie is, in my view, a powerful demolition of the grotesque failures of public life. And the sector whose failures are most brutally exposed is the media… it seemed all too real. I felt as if I were watching my adult life flash past me. As the scientists in the film, trying to draw attention to the approach of a planet-killing comet, bashed their heads against the Great Wall of Denial erected by the media and sought to reach politicians with 10-second attention spans, all the anger and frustration and desperation I’ve felt over the years boiled over.”

Well, I have to say I come down on the side of Joe Public (and the environmentalists) and not on the side of the critics who, as part of the mainstream media, were perhaps not best pleased by how the film portrayed that media. I liked Don’t Look Up and, despite what Louis Chilton claimed in the Independent, enjoyed several hearty laughs during its running time. There are a few problems, which I’ll talk about in a minute, but generally I’m happy to give the movie the thumbs up.

© Netflix / Hyperobject Industries

Much of what works in the movie is due to its impeccable cast. DiCaprio and Lawrence make a good double-act as the astronomers. DiCaprio is a timid character, at times a bundle of nerves, cerebral but inarticulate when he comes under pressure. Lawrence is the opposite, ready to forcibly speak her mind when she sees others obfuscating. As events unfurl, it’s the bumbling DiCaprio who unwittingly becomes a media star, probably because he matches public perceptions of what scientists should be like – cuddly, eccentric Albert Einstein types. Meanwhile, the abrasive Lawrence is banished from the limelight. DiCaprio plays along with this and ingratiates himself with the media and political establishments, believing he can exert a positive influence over the people in power who are dealing with the comet. He can’t, as it turns out, and while he compromises his principles his private life up-ends and he becomes estranged from his wife and children.

Perry and Blanchett are simultaneously amusing and chilling as the shallow talk-show hosts, though Blanchett is allowed a sliver of character development later when we learn she has three master’s degrees, meaning that her lack of acumen onscreen is merely an audience-pleasing act. The sequence where DiCaprio and Lawrence go on their show, The Daily Rip, to break the bad news about the comet to the world, and find the hosts more interested in interviewing a pop-poppet (played by Ariane Grande, no less) about her split with her pop-poppet boyfriend, is a masterclass in cringe comedy worthy of Ricky Gervais or Armando Iannucci.

Meryl Streep, meanwhile, is majestically horrible as the president. It would have been easy to portray her as a female Trump, but she’s smarter and smoother than the blustering, orange-skinned, cunning-without-being-smart property tycoon. “I say we sit tight and assess,” is her initial reaction to DiCaprio and Lawrence’s warnings, which she justifies with the observation, “You cannot go around saying to people that there’s 100% chance that they’re going to die. You know? It’s just nuts!” When she’s faced with a potentially explosive scandal and needs something to divert the media’s attention, however, she changes her tune. She suddenly plays up the comet and amid much patriotic hoopla marshals the US’s nuclear firepower in an effort to annihilate it before it reaches the earth. Her tune changes again when a major donor to her party persuades her to cancel the plan to destroy the comet, because it’s a goldmine of precious metals, and proposes a different way of handling it.

The donor is a Silicon Valley billionaire played by Mark Rylance, who believes his company has the capability to send a fleet of rocket-powered robots to the comet and seed it with explosives. These will break it into small, non-cataclysmic fragments that can be retrieved and put to lucrative use when they fall to earth. Stiff, eternally smiling, generally weird, Rylance comes across as a creepy mixture of Elon Musk, Andy Warhol and Michael Jackson. Incidentally, the character’s fondness for having children onstage with him when he’s unveiling his company’s latest high-tech gadgets reminded me faintly of Jackson’s disastrous performance of The Earth Song at the 1996 Brit Awards in London, when he had a crowd of child actors in tow. Rylance leaves you wondering if the character is a genius or just some arrested-development man-child who’s been extraordinarily lucky. Due to his wealth, of course, the establishment believe he is a genius and happily go along with his comet-breaking scheme. You can guess how it ends.

© Netflix / Hyperobject Industries

The best performance, though, comes from Jonah Hill as the White House Chief of Staff, who also happens to be President Streep’s son. If writer-director-producer Adam McKay doesn’t satirise Donald Trump directly with Streep, he certainly skewers the Trump White House with Hill’s character, a smug, obnoxious, entitled arse with all the characteristics of the promoted-beyond-their-abilities Trump kids (and Jared Kushner). Hill makes a meal of the role. “You’re breathing weird. It’s making me uncomfortable,” he whines at DiCaprio when the latter gets worked up describing the mile-high tsunamis that’ll crash across the planet when the comet hits. And when DiCaprio tells him the chance of this happening is ’99.78 percent’, he reacts, “Oh, great! So it’s not 100 percent.” McKay also uses the character to take a swipe at Trumpism’s biggest coup, that of convincing masses of ordinary, often hard-up people to support a wealthy, right-wing elite by demonising another part of America, the part that’s liberal, urban and educated. We hear Hill declare at a rally: “There’s three types of American people. There are you, the working class. Us, the cool rich. And then them!”

On the minus side, I’d say Don’t Look Up is about half-an-hour too long. Its unnecessary length means the satire gets a bit samey and the jokes get stretched a bit thin towards the end. Also, late on, there are jarring tonal shifts. We have solemn moments where DiCaprio tries to make peace with his loved ones and enjoy some final, life-affirming time with them, even while the gigantic tsunamis surge out from the comet’s strike-point. This put me in mind of another movie about a collision of celestial bodies, Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia (2011), even though for the most part it’s a million miles removed from Don’t Look Up in mood. However, intercut with the DiCaprio scenes are ones where the satire continues, with Streep, Rylance and a super-rich select few escaping from the earth, in suspended animation, on board a specially-prepared spaceship, which’ll take them to another earth-type planet 23,000 years from now. While I enjoyed both sub-plots, having them unwind side-by-side made me feel I was watching two different films.

Also, for a movie that’s about the disparagement of science, Don’t Look Up could have been more scientifically accurate in places. The initial operation to completely destroy the comet involves sending an astronaut (Ron Perlman) up into space on a suicide mission. He’s in a recommissioned space shuttle and shepherding a flock of rockets carrying nuclear bombs, all on a collision course with the comet. But the real space shuttle could never get beyond a low-earth orbit because it couldn’t carry enough propellant to go further. How is Perlman going to reach the comet, which is still a few months away at this point? Couldn’t they just launch the rockets, without the shuttle, and guide them from the ground? The ‘sleeper’ spaceship that appears at the end and transports a lucky few to a planet in a faraway solar system sets up a good final gag, but it troubled me too. If the elite, which includes Rylance’s character, have the technology at their disposal to create a spaceship like that – officially, manned interstellar space travel and suspended animation are beyond human know-how at the moment – couldn’t Rylance have put that fabulous technology to more immediate use and made a better job of his comet-breaking operation?

Although people have interpreted Don’t Look Up’s comet as a metaphor for climate change and society’s hopeless attempts, or non-attempts, to address it, I think the film is making broader comments about the scientific community, the media, politicians and their responses to crises generally. It’s not as if the politicians spend the whole film denying the existence of the comet, as some real-life ones still deny that climate change is happening. Fairly early on, it’s established that, yes, the comet is heading our way (although we see instances of ‘comet-deniers’ among the general public later on). It’s more about how self-interest and opportunism get in the way of necessary and meaningful action.

When Streep gives Rylance’s daft plan to harvest the comet the go-ahead, I found myself thinking of a real-life, down-to-earth and non-American parallel. During the Covid-19 pandemic in Britain, Boris Johnson’s Conservative government frequently handed out lucrative contracts for making personal protective equipment (PPE), establishing tracing programmes, setting up testing centres and so on to private companies that lacked medical experience, but were sympathetic to or connected with the Conservative party. Often, the results were disastrous. But hey, if you have access to power and can make a fast buck during a catastrophe, why not?

So actually, you don’t have to look up. Just look around you instead. It’s happening everywhere, this moment.

© Netflix / Hyperobject Industries

August 9, 2021

Cinematic heroes 3: David Warner

© Warner Bros.

I’ve just discovered that a few days ago was the 80^th birthday of the film and TV character actor David Warner. In honour of the great man becoming an octogenarian, here’s an updated version of a post I wrote about him eight years ago.

For most actors, becoming typecast is a pain in the neck. The day that the lugubrious-faced, distinctive-voiced David Warner became typecast, as an actor specialising in offbeat roles in offbeat films, often horror, science fiction and fantasy ones, it was actually a pane in the neck.

As Keith Jennings, the photographer who befriends Gregory Peck’s ambassador Richard Thorne in 1976’s The Omen, he is memorably decapitated when a sheet of glass comes crashing off the back of a truck and shears his head from his shoulders. Indeed, though The Omen was choc-a-block with people dying in gruesome freak accidents, and later there were Omen sequels with more freak accidents, and later still there were a half-dozen Final Destination movies following a similar template and serving up many more freak accidents, the cinema has seen very few freak accidents as spectacularly shocking as Warner’s in that 45-year-old movie.

The main actors in the big-budget Omen – Peck, Lee Remick, Billie Whitelaw – were names not normally associated with horror movies. Until then, Warner’s name hadn’t been associated with them either. Mancunian by birth, he started acting professionally in 1962 and the following year joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, which led to stage roles in Henry IV Part 1, Henry VI Parts I-III, Julius Caesar, Richard II, The Tempest, Twelfth Night and, in 1965, playing the title role, Hamlet. The earliest films he appeared in were sometimes theatrical in origin too, such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Sea Gull, which both appeared in 1968. However, it was in 1966’s Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment that he made his biggest impression on 1960s movie audiences. In it he plays a working-class artist who’s abandoned by his posh wife, played by Vanessa Redgrave, and goes to unhinged extremes to win her back.

When Warner’s career is discussed, it’s often overlooked that he was once a regular performer with the legendary action-movie director Sam Peckinpah. His association with the hard-drinking, coke-snorting, near-deranged filmmaker started with 1970’s The Ballad of Cable Hogue, in which he played an eccentric preacher who befriends Jason Robards’ titular hero. Peckinpah often boasted, “I can’t direct when I’m sober,” and for the young Warner Hogue must have been quite an initiation into the director’s weird and wonderful ways. When bad weather held up filming, Peckinpah and his crew went on a massive drinking binge and ran up a bar-bill worth thousands and thousands of dollars.

In the next year’s Straw Dogs, Peckinpah’s taboo-busting film set in the English West Country, Warner plays a simpleton who unwittingly kills a girl and then takes refuge in Dustin Hoffman and Susan George’s house with a squad of vigilantes on his trail. In Cross of Iron, Peckinpah’s 1977 war movie about a doomed German platoon on the Russian front, he plays a humane German officer who just wants to get through the war in one piece. In fact, in Cross of Iron, nearly all the Germans, including James Coburn’s gallant corporal and James Mason’s world-weary colonel, are humane types who view war with extreme distaste. What upsets the apple-cart, and eventually gets most of them killed, is the arrival of Maximillian Schell’s glory-hunting Prussian officer. Schell is obsessed with winning an iron cross for himself and isn’t worried about other soldiers dying in the process.

In 1973 Warner made his first appearance in a horror film, the British anthology movie From Beyond the Grave, whose stories were based on the writings of Ronald Chetwyn-Hayes. In the film’s first story, The Gate Crasher, he plays an arrogant prick called Edward Charlton who acquires an old mirror from an antique shop and gets it on the cheap by lying to the shop-owner about the mirror’s likely age. Charlton obviously hasn’t seen many horror films before. Otherwise, he might have thought twice about cheating a proprietor played by Peter Cushing in a shop called Temptations Inc. He gets his just deserts. The mirror turns out to be inhabited by a malevolent spirit, which possesses him and drives him to commit murder.

It was in the late 1970s and early 1980s that Warner got his fondest-remembered roles, starting with the kindly but ill-fated Jennings in The Omen. Then, in 1979’s Time After Time, he switches from being a nice guy to being a bad one, playing John Leslie Stevenson, a Victorian gentleman and friend of the pioneering science-fiction writer H.G. Wells, who’s played by Malcolm McDowell. Unbeknownst to Wells, Stevenson has been making a name for himself by butchering prostitutes in Whitechapel – for he is none other than Jack the Ripper. When Wells unveils his latest invention, a working time machine like the one he would later write about in his famous 1895 novella, Stevenson uses it to escape the closing police net and scoots one century forward into the future. But the machine has a recall function, so a horrified Wells summons it back to the 19^th century and uses it to follow Leslie to 1979. Wells assumes that he’s let Jack the Ripper loose on Utopia and, predictably, is more than a little disappointed to find that the 20^th century is less utopian than he’d anticipated. Meanwhile, the Ripper has taken to the era’s violence, sleaze and heavy-decibel rock music like a duck to water.

A quirky and very entertaining movie, Time After Time was written and directed by Nicholas Meyer who, regrettably, devoted most of his energies to the less adventurous and eccentric, and more mainstream and family-friendly Star Trek franchise during the 1980s. Actually, it’s probably because of Meyer’s involvement that both Warner and Malcolm McDowell have made appearances in Star Trek films – Warner was in both Star Trek V and VI (1989 and 1991). I’m not much of a fan of Star Trek or its movie spin-offs, but I like the sixth one, largely because Warner is in it. He plays Chancellor Gorkon, charismatic leader of the Klingons and obviously modelled on the then Soviet leader Mikael Gorbachev, who’s decided it’s time for the Klingon Empire to pursue peace-talks with the Federation.

In 1981 Warner delivered another memorable performance in Terry Gilliam’s cinematic fairy tale The Time Bandits. He plays Evil, who’s been created by Ralph Richardson’s Supreme Being and then imprisoned in a hellish place called the Fortress of Ultimate Darkness. Obviously, Warner and Richardson’s characters are the Devil and God under different monikers. Some fine actors have played Old Nick in movies over the years, including Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Jack Nicholson, but for my money Warner’s portrayal is the most entertaining. His Devil is a petulant and embittered type who spends his time ranting at his idiotic minions (“Shut up! I’m speaking rhetorically!”) about how rubbish God is. The Almighty, he argues, has wasted His time creating useless things such as slugs, and nipples for men, and 43 species of parrots, when He could have concentrated on making laser beams, car phones and VCRs. Warner steals the show in The Time Bandits, which is no minor achievement considering that in addition to Richardson the film stars Ian Holm, John Cleese, Sean Connery, Michael Palin, Shelley Duvall and a delightful gang of time-traveling dwarves led by David Rappaport.

Thereafter, Warner’s CV filled with all manner of odd movies, hardly Shakespearean in the acting opportunities they offered, but relished by obsessives like myself. These include 1979’s Nightwing, 1980’s The Island, 1987’s Waxwork, 1991’s Cast a Deadly Spell, 1995’s In the Mouth of Madness, 1997’s Scream 2 and 2010’s Black Death.

As an actor he’s adept at playing out-and-out villains, for example, his Dillinger / Sark character in the 1981 Disney computer-game fantasy Tron, a movie that was unappreciated at the time but that, in the decades since, has been accorded considerable retro-cool. He’s also good at doing mad scientists, like the splendidly named Doctor Alfred Necessiter in the whacky 1982 comedy The Man with Two Brains, which is poignant today as a reminder of the time when Steve Martin used to be funny.

But he also has harassed and melancholic qualities, which come nicely to the fore when he’s playing fathers. He was, for instance, the heroine’s father in 1984’s The Company of Wolves, Neil Jordan’s atmospheric and sensual adaptation of Angela Carter’s gothic short stories. Meanwhile, in Tim Burton’s 2001 remake of Planet of the Apes, he plays Senator Sandar, father of dishy chimpanzee Helena Bonham-Carter. In heavy simian make-up and in Warner’s unmistakable tones, Sandar sighs at one point: “Youth is wasted on the young…”

In 1997 Warner found time to appear in James Cameron’s Titanic, then the biggest-grossest movie of all time. Say what you like about Titanic, about the mawkish love story between Kate Winslet and Leonardo Di Caprio, about Billy Zane’s cartoonish performance as the villain, about the unspeakable theme song sung by Celine Dion, but you can’t deny that it has a great supporting cast: Warner, Kathy Bates, Bernard Hill, Victor Garber, Bill Paxton. Warner, playing Spicer Lovejoy, Zane’s valet, doesn’t have much to do apart from connive with his master, stalk around, spy on Kate Winslet and generally behave sinisterly. He does, though, get to punch Di Caprio in the guts after he’s been handcuffed to a railing on board the sinking liner, which is actually my favourite bit in the film. (Warner also turned up in a 1979 movie called SOS Titanic and the Titanic features in The Time Bandits too. Thus, he’s a titanic actor in all senses of the term.)

Warner has long been a fixture on television as well. He’s appeared in one-off TV movies and dramas like 1984’s Frankenstein, where he plays the creature to Robert Powell’s Victor Frankenstein and Carrie Fisher’s Elizabeth, 1993’s Body Bags and 2003’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; appeared in series and mini-series like 1981’s Masada, 1982’s Marco Polo, 1984’s Charlie, 2011’s Secret of Crickley Hall and, from 2008 to 2016, Wallander, in which he plays another father, this time to Kenneth Branagh; and lent his voice to animated shows, including the Superman, Batman and Spiderman ones during the 1990s.

Some of his TV work is as cult-y as his film work. In 1991, he guest-starred in three episodes of David Lynch’s glorious, off-the-wall crime / horror / sci-fi / soap opera Twin Peaks, playing Thomas Eckhardt, a Hong Kong-based crime-lord who has a long and dark history with Joan Chen’s Jocelyn Packard. Two years after that, he appeared in the underrated, Oliver Stone-produced mini-series Wild Palms, a hybrid of conspiracy thriller, Alice in Wonderland and the then-recent literary genre of cyberpunk. Set in a near-future USA, under the heel of an organisation that’s part multinational corporation and part Scientology-style religious sect, the show features Warner as Eli, the leader of an underground resistance movement. (This clip neatly encapsulates Wild Palms’ weird energy.) And in 2014 he popped up in John Logan and Sam Mendes’ gothic horror mash-up Penny Dreadful, in the role of Bram Stoker’s vampire hunter Abraham Van Helsing. Because Warner played Frankenstein’s creature in 1984, it’s ironic that in Penny Dreadful – in a cheeky tangling of Stoker and Mary Shelley’s original narratives – Van Helsing gets killed by the same creature, played this time by Rory Kinnear.

In 2005 Warner was involved with the macabre TV comedy show The League of Gentlemen, written by and starring Mark Gatiss, Reece Shearsmith, Steve Pemberton and Jeremy Dyson. In fact, he didn’t appear in the show itself, but in its cinematic spinoff The League of Gentlemen’s Apocalypse. Like many a film-based-on-a-TV-show, it doesn’t really work on the big screen, though its most effective scenes are definitely those featuring Warner as a 17^th century magician called Dr Erasmus Pea. His character is rottenly evil but he’s very amusing too. For example, while Dr Pea uses a pan to fry a hellish concoction including two recently gouged-out eyeballs, from which he plans to grow a monstrous homunculus, the camera cuts to a close-up and he pulls a pretentiously absorbed, TV-chef expression worthy of Jamie Oliver.

Warner clearly gets along with The League of Gentlemen’s creators, because since then he has appeared alongside Mark Gatiss in the radio comedy show Nebulous (2005-8); in The Cold War, a 2013 Gatiss-scripted episode of Doctor Who; and in The Trial of Elizabeth Gadge, a 2015 episode of Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton’s acclaimed anthology show Inside No. 9.

The 21^st century has seen Warner return to the stage, giving well-received turns as the venerable and vulnerable monarch in King Lear in 2005 and as Falstaff in Henry IV Parts I and II in 2007. His IMDb entry lists his most recent movie appearance as 2018’s Mary Poppins Returns and says he was still doing voice-work last year. Warner is now at an age where you wouldn’t begrudge for him retiring and choosing an easier life of armchairs, cardigan, slippers and pipe, but I for one hope that some young filmmakers – perhaps ones who grew up enjoying his performances in The Omen, Time After Time, The Time Bandits and Tron when they were shown on TV – coax him into making a few more movies. He’s the sort of actor whose mere presence in a film, no matter how good or bad, gives you a glow.