Michael Lonsdale

Just saw Munich, Spielberg's thriller about the Israeli assassination squad that avenged the murder of Olympic athletes in 72. I don't rate film very highly. But what I want to do here is draw attention to one of the secondary actors. He has one of those faces that you instantly recognise because you have seen him a dozen times. The trouble is you can't remember where. I refer to Michael, or sometimes Michel, Lonsdale, who plays the quintessentially amoral Frenchman named in the film only "Papa". The scene in which he presides over a extended family luncheon with millions of adoring grandchildren is utter tosh of course, as is the whole notion of his empire of information. I was just happy to see his jowly face again, and try to recall its previous outings. Two come to mind straight away. He was the baddy Hugo Drax in one of the great Roger Moore James Bonds, Moonraker. And in the 1972 Day of the Jackal, he played Claude Lebel, the detective whose inspired work foils James Fox's assassination bid on de Gaulle. In that film he has a moustache and no beard but the big cheeks are a giveaway. Further research reminds me that he was the abbot in The Name of the Rose, and Anton Grigoriev -- the Russian consul in Berne -- in the TV series Smiley's People. Actually he'd been in scores of films, most of them French, since the 1960s. He is half-and-half. His father was English and his mother French, and he was born in Paris in 1931. Interesting character.