Peter Cushing played mad scientists, vampire hunters and space tyrants as if each were a difficult colleague at a serious institution, and he never winked. That seriousness is why the Hammer films still stand up, and why he was asked to make so many of them.
Fi1m perspective
Peter Cushing's habit is to speak quietly to people who are used to being shouted at. In Star Wars (1977) he is Grand Moff Tarkin, a thin man in a grey uniform who gives orders to a seven-foot figure in a black mask and barely turns his head to do it. Lucas's film is loud and quick and Cushing is neither, and the scenes he is in are the ones where the Empire looks like something that might actually win. We were more frightened of him than of anything with a lightsabre, because he is the only person aboard who sounds as though he has read the paperwork.
He came up the slow way: repertory theatre from the mid-1930s, bit parts in Hollywood, then back to Britain during the war. In Olivier's Hamlet (1948) he is Osric, on for a few minutes near the end with a hat and a bow, and it is one of the few moments that film lets itself laugh. Television made him; he was Winston Smith in the BBC's Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1954. Then came Hammer and The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), and for two decades he was Baron Frankenstein, Dr Van Helsing in Dracula (1958), Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959), and Frankenstein again. Terence Fisher directed him seven times. Christopher Lee shared twenty-two films with him, which is longer than some marriages.
What he brought to all of it was the refusal to condescend. A castle full of rubber bats got the same clipped, precise delivery as Shakespeare, and hero and villain got the same dignity, so that you were never quite told which one you were watching. He prepared like a scholar, researched the parts, chose his own props and did his own stunts when a laboratory needed wrecking. In The Curse of Frankenstein he explains the indefensible so reasonably that we found ourselves nodding along, and then felt a small chill at having nodded. That is the trick, and it does not date.
The complaint, then and now, is that he did the same thing too often, and that Hammer's formula wore the parts smooth. There is something in it; Frankenstein and Van Helsing are hard to tell apart on a bad night. He knew it himself. "Who wants to see me as Hamlet? Very few. But millions want to see me as [Baron] Frankenstein, so that's the one I do." It is a more honest account of a career than most actors manage.
If you know him only from Star Wars, go to Dracula and watch the same man do the same thing with a crucifix instead of a space station. It is, more or less, the same performance. That is not a complaint.
Biography
Peter Wilton Cushing was an English actor. He was born on 26 May 1913 in Kenley, Surrey, and trained at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama before working in repertory theatre.
Cushing appeared in numerous Hammer Films horror productions from the 1950s onwards, playing Baron Victor Frankenstein in The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Doctor Van Helsing in Dracula (1958), often opposite Christopher Lee. He also portrayed Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959).
His later roles included Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars (1977). He was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1989 and died on 11 August 1994.
