Ronald Pickup made a career of the man at the edge of the frame, the governor, the minister, the archbishop, and gave each one an inner life using only his eyes and his bearing. We hold two of his films, and neither uses him well.
Fi1m perspective
Gary Oldman's Churchill takes up all the air in Darkest Hour (2017), and Stephen Dillane's Halifax gets the best of the arguments. Ronald Pickup, as Neville Chamberlain, gets neither. He plays the man Churchill replaced as tired and already ill, and he does it the way he did most things, with almost nothing on his face but his face: no makeup to speak of, just the eyes and the way he holds himself. We came out feeling sorrier for Chamberlain than the script meant us to, and that was Pickup's work, not Anthony McCarten's, whose Chamberlain is there so that Churchill can be right.
He was a stage actor first and for longest. He joined the National Theatre under Laurence Olivier and worked up from small parts to leads, Rosalind in the all-male As You Like It of 1967 among them, and he was still on stage in the 2010s. Television found him early, in Doctor Who in 1964; film used him sparingly. He was the Forger in The Day of the Jackal (1973) and Hontar, the Portuguese governor, in The Mission (1986). On television he was Prince Yakimov, the down-at-heel aristocrat in Fortunes of War (1987), opposite Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson, and that is the performance his admirers name first. Then, late, came the two Marigold Hotel films (2012, 2015) for John Madden, with Judi Dench, with whom he made three films, and a wider audience learned his name.
The pattern in those parts is the pattern of the career. He was cast as authority: governors, ministers, archbishops, crusty academics, men whose job in the script is to stand for an institution and then step aside. He gave them something the script rarely asked for, a private life going on behind the official face. That is what we mean by his eyes and his bearing, and it is also why the parts stayed small. An actor who can make a type credible in two scenes is asked to do exactly that, film after film. Our review of The Mission does not mention him, and we stand by that: Robert Bolt's script leaves its people underdeveloped, and Hontar is one of the people it leaves.
The obituaries were unanimous in his favour, and that is worth a moment's suspicion. Nobody has a reservation about Ronald Pickup because nobody gave him a part big enough to fail in. He died in 2021. If you want to see what he could do, Darkest Hour is the one we have and the one where it shows. Watch him when the film is not watching him.
Biography
Ronald Pickup (1940–2021) was an English actor known for work in film, television and theatre. Born in Chester, he trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) and began his screen career with an appearance in Doctor Who in 1964.
He was a member of Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre company and appeared in productions including Three Sisters and Long Day’s Journey Into Night. On screen he played Hontar in The Mission (1986), Elliott in Never Say Never Again (1983), Norman Cousins in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2012) and its sequel, and the Archbishop of Canterbury in The Crown (2016). Other notable roles include Neville Chamberlain in Darkest Hour (2017) and King Sharaman in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010).
