Michael Lonsdale, Anglo-French actor widely known to millions as Hugo Drax in Moonraker – obituary
He played monks in two of his best films and in his private life was a committed Christian
Michael Lonsdale, the actor, who has died aged 89, was most familiar to English-speaking audiences from his roles in mainstream international films, such as The Day of the Jackal (1973) and Moonraker (1979), in which he played James Bond’s sinister adversary Hugo Drax; in his native France, however, he was chiefly associated with experimental theatre and the cinema of the New Wave.
With his soft, bland looks and beetling eyebrows, Lonsdale made his career primarily in supporting parts, but ones illuminated from within with such understated skill that they enabled the production’s stars to shine.
He first came to wider notice as Lebel, the French policeman hunting Edward Fox’s assassin in Fred Zinnemann’s The Day of the Jackal. The character – a European authority figure, his distinctively mellifluous voice capable both of command and enchantment – became the template for his film roles, which he used to fund less commercial work.
Lonsdale accepted the part of Drax in Moonraker, he said, “because I made so many films that were not really very popular or didn’t make much money, and I only made poor films, so I thought I might like to be in a rich film!”
He did not know that he was being considered for the film until Roger Moore introduced himself while Lonsdale was having coffee in a Nice hotel. Lonsdale relished his turn as the suave, coldly maniacal Drax, who plans to wipe out the human race and repopulate the planet with perfect specimens kept in his space station.
He was subsequently seen as the abbot of the medieval monastery investigated by Sean Connery in The Name of the Rose (1986), in The Remains of the Day (1993) and Jefferson in Paris (1995), both directed by James Ivory, and in the thrillers Ronin (1998) and Munich (2005).
Perhaps his finest performance in English, however, was on television, as the weak, philandering Russian diplomat Grigoriev who is ruthlessly blackmailed and turned by Alec Guinness in the BBC’s Smiley’s People (1982).
He was born Michael Edward Lonsdale-Crouch in Paris on May 24 1931, the child of what was initially an affair between his half-Irish mother Simone and his father Edward, a British Army officer, who was a friend of her first husband.
Michael’s older half-brother, Gerald Calderon, also became a figure of note in French cinema as an actor, director and later studio executive.
Michael spent his early years on Jersey, where his parents kept a hotel, and then in London. He recalled being issued with a gas mask and hearing Hitler’s voice issuing from the wireless during the Munich crisis. By the time war came, the family was living in Morocco, where his father represented a fertiliser company.
But when the French warships at Mers-el-Kébir were attacked by the Royal Navy in 1940, young Michael’s father was interned by the Vichy authorities. Released after the Allied landings in 1942, he returned home a shadow of his self. Michael would draw on this experience in 1975 when portraying an apathetic diplomat in Marguerite Duras’s Le Vice-consul.
Morocco provided him with two lasting influences. He escaped his parents’ unhappiness in the cinemas set up for US troops, where he fell under the spell of the screen viewing the films of John Ford, George Cukor – and Casablanca. He also became interested in matters of faith after being given a copy of the Koran by an antiques dealer with whom he would talk.
In 1946, his parents now separated, he and his mother returned to France, setting up in her father’s apartment in Paris, opposite the Invalides, in which Michael would live for the rest of his life.
He left school before taking his baccalauréat, intending to study painting, but after a seeing a Strindberg play realised that he wanted to act. He trained with a celebrated teacher, Tania Balachova, whose method aimed at revealing to her students unsuspected facets of their character.
For Lonsdale, this was humour, and in France he was often regarded primarily as, if not a comic actor, then as a comedian, albeit a melancholy one. He began to make his way with a theatre company in the mid-1950s, as well as appearing in the first of what would become some 150 films.
He would go on to be directed by Orson Welles (The Trial, 1962), Luis Buñuel, Jean-Luc Godard and Joseph Losey, with highlights including his performance as a shoe-shop owner in François Truffaut’s Stolen Kisses (1968) and in Louis Malle’s autobiographical Murmur of the Heart (1971).
Lonsdale also appeared in Jacques Rivette’s improvised, 13-hour-long Out 1 (1971), in which he drew on his extensive experience in avant-garde stage productions.
A devotee of Brecht’s plays, Lonsdale appeared in many of those that helped to establish the reputations in France of Eugène Ionesco and Samuel Beckett, and also collaborated with Peter Brook.
One of his last roles of note was as a Trappist monk in Of Gods and Men (2010), about a monastic community in Algeria threatened by Islamic extremists. The film, based on a true story, brought Lonsdale his only César, the French Oscar.
He had been baptised a Roman Catholic at 22, made the Christian life central to his own, and from the 1980s onwards became part of the Church’s charismatic movement. In his memoir, Le dictionnaire de ma vie (2016), he revealed that he had long been in love with his friend Delphine Seyrig, the actress, but since she was married had not pressed her.
He did not, however, marry anyone else. He observed that the tormented howls of his character in Le vice-consul, in which he played someone vainly in love with Seyrig’s diplomatic wife, required little acting.
Michael Lonsdale, born May 24 1931, died September 21 2020
