Julian Glover plays men who give orders in a level voice and never get their hands dirty, and he has done it for generals, shipping magnates and grand maesters. It is a narrow trade, done with real polish, and sometimes too polished to frighten.
Fi1m perspective
Julian Glover's villains do not shout. In For Your Eyes Only (1981) his Aristotle Kristatos is a shipping man in a good suit who talks softly and lets other people do the hitting. A year earlier, in The Empire Strikes Back (1980), he was General Maximilian Veers, an Imperial officer, and by Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) he was Walter Donovan, a well-spoken American and one of the parts he took in an accent not his own. Different uniforms, same man: authority worn like a tailored coat, and a calm that suggests the unpleasant things will be handled by somebody junior.
The calm comes from the stage. He came out of RADA in 1954, joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in the late 1950s and spent the 1960s and 1970s largely on British television, so by the time the franchises found him he had thirty years of standing still and being listened to. He went back for the kings, most notably Henry IV for the RSC in 1992, which is the performance his stage reputation rests on. Then came the long television part, Grand Maester Pycelle in Game of Thrones from 2011, and a late supporting role as Andris Davis in TÁR (2022). The through line is a man other people defer to.
What works is the restraint. After the Bond villains with steel teeth, Kristatos is a relief: a man with money and manners who never raises a hand himself. What does not work is that restraint has a cost, and For Your Eyes Only pays it. We admired Kristatos throughout and were never once alarmed by him, and somewhere around the midpoint we realised the film needed us to be, and that it was Michael Gothard's silent Locque, watching from behind his glasses, who was doing the frightening. Glover gives you the head of the organisation; the menace has to be hired separately.
That is also why he is easy to overlook in Last Crusade. Our own review spends its affection on Harrison Ford and Sean Connery and does not stop for Donovan, and that is not a slight so much as a description of the job. Glover's villains hold the frame steady while the leads do the living. It is useful work and he has done it for forty years without ever seeming to sweat.
See For Your Eyes Only for the tailoring and the voice, and notice how much the film relies on other people to make you nervous. If you want to see what the voice can do when the part is large enough to fill it, the record suggests you should have been at Stratford in 1992.
Biography
Julian Glover is an English actor. Born Julian Wyatt Glover on 27 March 1935 in Hampstead, London, he trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company. He has appeared in numerous stage productions and British television series from the 1960s onwards.
His film roles include General Maximilian Veers in The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Aristotle Kristatos in For Your Eyes Only (1981) and Walter Donovan in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). On television he played Grand Maester Pycelle in Game of Thrones (2011–2016) and provided the voice of Aragog in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002). He received a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2013 for services to drama.
Glover has been married to actress Isla Blair since 1968; their son Jamie Glover is also an actor.
