Death of British actor Murray Melvin, featured in Barry Lyndon and The Lost City of Z

A great stage actor with features reminiscent of his co-star Peter Cushing, who had a rich career of hundreds of roles on the small and big screens, Murray Melvin made his public debut in 1962 in Un Taste of. Tony Richardson’s Honey, for which he won the Best Actor Award at the Cannes Film Festival. The British actor died on Friday at the age of 90, believed to be the result of a bad fall in December last year.

Born in London in August 1932, Murray Melvin had little interest in school, leaving at the age of 14 to work for a travel agency firm. His encounter with the world of drama began in the early 1950s, when he worked as a full-time assistant. Joan Littlewood Theater WorkshopA theater workshop run by Joan Littlewood, a renowned English theater director who studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

In 1957, climbing the ladder, he became an assistant director and that year made his stage debut in an adaptation of a play. Macbeth. In the early 1960s, he made several small appearances in TV series, during an episode such as a bowler hat and leather boots.

Interpretation Award in Cannes

It was in 1962, when he presented himself to the general public on the big screen, thanks to the powerful drama of the great British film director Tony Richardson. the taste of honey. His composition as a homosexual student taking on a young pregnant girl abandoned by her mother won over the Cannes jury, who awarded him the prize for best actor. Then his career went into orbit.

Although he has never been a leading actor in movies and TV series, Murray Melvin has starred in many very solid films. Let’s mention the excellent adventure film Les Mutinés du Téméraire in 1962; classic Alfie the Flirty; His director friend Ken Russell’s Extraordinary Devils or Joel Schumacher’s 2004 adaptation of Phantom of the Opera.

But for many moviegoers, it remains Reverend Samuel Rant Stanley Kubrick’s dazzling Barry Lyndon, where he offered his features to this religious, connected to the service of the famous Lyndon family, expressing his disdain for this upbringing of Redmond Barry (Ryan O’Neill). ). In Interview in 2011He will return – like many others – to the master’s maniacal perfectionism, which requires him to reshoot the scene up to 57, where the priest talks to Marie Keane, who plays Barry’s mother.

Below, one of her scenes from the film where she celebrates the wedding between Redmond Barry and Lady Lyndon…

Alternate appearances in TV series such as Torchwood or Inspector Barnaby, but also occasionally in demand in the cinema, as in James Gray’s powerful film The Lost City of Z, Murray Melvin made his last film in 2019, where he plays an Englishman. Lord, down; Thriller directed by Christian Le Hamon.