Damien Thomas

Watch enough British television drama from the last forty years and a tall, dark, courteous man will eventually walk in to do something faintly sinister, usually in an accent from somewhere south of Dover. Damien Thomas played that man for most of his working life: the priest, the don, the doctor who knows more than he is saying. He knew it himself. "I seem destined to play the saturnine and tanned roles. But I couldn't care less – because they're usually good meaty parts." That is a fair account of the career, and a more cheerful one than most actors in his position would give.

The lead came first and did not come again. In Twins of Evil (1971) he was Count Karnstein, Hammer's decadent, satanic vampire, and he played him large, with the Shakespearean swagger his training had given him. Some found it hammy. We enjoyed him more than the film around him deserved, because he is the only person in it who seems to be having a good time, and he lets us see it. He later called the years that followed the worst of his career, and the leading roles in films went to other people.

What he did instead was work. The Message (1976), Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977), with a Ray Harryhausen transformation to sit through, and then Shōgun (1980), where he played Father Martin Alvito, the Jesuit translator, and learned Japanese to do it. In Roman Polanski's Pirates (1986) he was the antagonist, Don Alfonso de la Torré, opposite Walter Matthau. Seeing it again decades later, he decided he was not so bad in it and that the trouble was Matthau. We will leave that between the two of them.

Our review of The Long Firm (2004) does not mention him. It is about Mark Strong and Derek Jacobi and the way the last two hours drift, and his Tom Driberg, the flamboyant Labour MP, is one of the things going on at the edge of those hours. That is not a criticism. His job, in the second half of his career, was to make a room look as if the right people were in it, and he did that in literary adaptations and prestige series for decades without the camera turning round to thank him. The late film parts fit the pattern: a doctor in Never Let Me Go (2010), The Doctor in Ben Wheatley's Kill List (2011), Salomon Weil in The Limehouse Golem (2016), each brief, each a little unsettling, each gone before you have placed the face.

If you want to see him properly, start with Twins of Evil, then Shōgun, and after that you will find him turning up everywhere, which is as good a measure of his kind of actor as there is.