Ronald Lacey had a face directors could not leave alone and a smile that turned, on cue, into something worse. He spent two decades in British television before Spielberg made him the villain everyone remembers, and he never quite got out of the uniform.
Fi1m perspective
Ronald Lacey smiled a great deal on screen, and it was never good news. The smile began pleasantly enough and then kept going, past the point where a smile should stop, until it was a leer or a cackle, and the small eyes above it, under brows he barely had, did not move at all. Directors looked at the upturned nose, the overbite, the mole on the left cheek, and reached for the same sort of part: the seedy one, the creepy one, the one nobody trusts. He was compared to Peter Lorre, and the comparison is fair, though Lacey always looked as if he was enjoying it more.
He had been at it a long time before anyone outside Britain noticed. Television from 1959, the Royal Court in 1962 in Chips with Everything, then a steady run through the sixties and seventies: the Village Idiot in Roman Polanski's The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967), Richard Lester's How I Won the War the same year, and Harris in Porridge (1977), the oily, bungling prisoner nobody on the landing wants to sit next to. By the end of the seventies he was thinking of giving it up to run a talent agency. Then Steven Spielberg cast him as Major Arnold Toht, the Gestapo man in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), and that was that.
Toht is the reason most people can picture him. Our review of Raiders did not single him out, and that is right; it is Harrison Ford's film and Spielberg's. But we did note that its violence is rougher than its playful tone suggests, and some of that roughness is Lacey, who gives the picture one properly frightening grown-up: a small, soft, courteous man who is plainly looking forward to what comes next. He does it without raising his voice.
The villain roles followed, as they do. Firefox (1982) for Clint Eastwood, Sahara (1983), Red Sonja (1985), a Cardinal in Paul Verhoeven's Flesh + Blood (1985). We thought little of Firefox, but Lacey is not what is wrong with it. He and Warren Clarke play men with hours left, and we found ourselves more worried for the pair of them than for Eastwood, who has the plane and the top billing; Lacey plays Semelovsky as a man who has already done the arithmetic and does not ask to be liked for it. The comedy never went away either. He played Princess Aida in Trenchcoat (1983), and the Bishop of Bath and Wells in Blackadder II (1986) is Toht with better lines and no plot to carry.
He died in 1991, at fifty-five. The face that nearly sent him into agenting is the reason he is still remembered, and it was never the whole of what he did with it. Watch the small parts. He is in them for a few minutes at a time, and he does more with his mouth than most leading men manage with the script.
Biography
Ronald William Lacey was an English actor. Born in Harrow, Middlesex, he trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art after national service.
Lacey made numerous film and television appearances from the late 1950s until his death. His roles included the Village Idiot in The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967), Major Arnold Toht in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Semelovsky in Firefox (1982), the Bishop of Bath and Wells in Blackadder (1986) and a Gestapo officer in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). He also appeared in Red Sonja (1985) and Flesh + Blood (1985).
