With his bald head, short stature, and a round face framing narrow, intense eyes and downturned mouth, Donald Pleasence (1919-1995) was never destined for leading man stardom. Yet his memorable voice, stage-trained acting talent and particular demeanor so often suited to playing unstable or evil characters, translated into a long and successful career. He appeared in more than 200 film and television appearances between 1954 and 1996 and created at least two unforgettable characters, one heroic and good, the other creepy and threatening, that have become lasting cinema icons.

The son of a Nottinghamshire, England, stationmaster, Pleasence had elocution lessons as a child and started acting on the London stage in 1939, just out of his teens, but his career was interrupted by World War II. Initially a conscientious objector, he changed his mind and volunteered for the Royal Air Force. His plane was shot down, and he was held prisoner for the duration of the war, an experience that would prove beneficial to one of his best roles later in his career. During his time in the POW camp, he organized a theater company to pass the time. One of his productions was Robert E. Sherwood's The Petrified Forest, in which, in the part taken by Leslie Howard in the 1936 film, the 5' 4" actor played opposite a 6'1" Canadian in the Bette Davis role.

He resumed acting – professionally – after the war, first on stage and then in television dramas in the early 1950s, eventually earning notice from critics as "The Man with the Hypnotic Eye." His first feature film role was in The Beachcomber (1954), adapted from a Somerset Maugham story. He gained international exposure with a part in the first film adaptation of George Orwell's 1984 (1956) but stuck close to home, and the theater, for most of the decade, appearing with Richard Burton in the screen version of John Osborne's landmark stage drama Look Back in Anger (1958), a small role in the British film of Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (1958) starring Dirk Bogarde, and one of his first substantial villain roles as the dastardly Prince John in five episodes of the TV series The Adventures of Robin Hood between 1956 and 1958.

His real breakthrough came in 1963. First, he earned high praise as the bum in Harold Pinter's The Caretaker (1963), a role that had earned him a Tony Award nomination on the Broadway stage a year earlier. Then he appeared as the sweet-natured, soft-spoken forger Blythe in the blockbuster war adventure The Great Escape (1963). Pleasence drew on his own experiences as a POW, the only member of the cast with such first-hand knowledge. It helped his sympathetic, understated performance greatly, but was not particularly welcomed by director John Sturges. Early on in the shoot, Pleasence tried to make suggestions, "but they didn't go down well with Sturges and the American crew, who believed all people who were in a prison camp, especially if you were American, were enormously brave," he said.

Pleasence's connection to the somewhat fictionalized but true-life story of a massive POW breakout continued after this film. In a made-for-television sequel, The Great Escape II: The Untold Story (1988), he played a character on the opposite side of the conflict. By this time firmly established as a character actor expert at portraying evil, he was cast as a Gestapo officer who takes part in the execution of 50 of the recaptured escapees. He also played real-life Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler, the man who ordered the mass execution, in the war adventure The Eagle Has Landed (1976), also directed by Sturges. (Pleasence worked with Sturges one other time, in a comic Western starring Burt Lancaster, The Hallelujah Trail, 1965.)

Pleasence's ability to project both a disquieting instability and an understated malevolence made him a highly sought-after character player for the remainder of his career. He played a mad KGB agent on the lam, threatening to unleash a world conflict, in the Charles Bronson thriller Telefon (1977), and one of three high-ranking Nazi officers suspected of the grisly murders of prostitutes in The Night of the Generals (1967), with Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif. His most indelible bad-guy role was as James Bond's arch-enemy, Ernst Blofeld, the mastermind behind the global criminal organization SPECTRE, in You Only Live Twice (1967). Other actors have played the same character (Telly Savalas in On Her Majesty's Secret Service [1969], Charles Gray in Diamonds Are Forever, [1971]), but it is Pleasence's soft-spoken, creepy demeanor, stroking his frosty white cat while planning worldwide destruction, that remains the most memorable interpretation of the role. So easily identified is his performance that Mike Myers parodied it deliciously, down to the bald head and long facial scar, as the character Dr. Evil in the Austin Powers spy spoofs.

Donald Pleasence had a softer side, too, and it was well used by director John Carpenter in the horror film Halloween (1978). As kindly, dedicated Dr. Sam Loomis, he brought a degree of dogged heroism to the story of a psychiatrist stalking an escaped mental patient before he kills again. The role proved so popular that Pleasence played it in four sequels up to 1995 (his penultimate film appearance). Reportedly, when Halloween producer Moustapha Akkad asked the actor how many times he would be willing to play the role, the reply was, "I stop at 22!" Another story says that Pleasence used to joke that before playing Loomis, he was always typecast as villains and psychos and never given the chance to play a hero, but after playing the Van Helsing-like doctor, he had the exact opposite problem; most of the roles he was offered were avengers and good guys with the occasional rare exception (the insane uncle in Poe's The House of Usher, [1988]).

One other interesting bit of trivia about Dr. Sam Loomis: Carpenter later cast Pleasence as the lead in another horror film, Prince of Darkness (1987). In this one he played Father Loomis, who unwittingly unleashes Satan into the world. He also played a character named Loomis in the crime drama Innocent Bystanders (1972). Sam Loomis, by the way, was also the name of the lover of the ill-fated Marion Crane in Alfred Hitchcock's landmark thriller Psycho (1960), no doubt an homage on Carpenter's part.

Donald Pleasence died in February 1995 in France of complications following heart valve replacement surgery. He was 75. Shortly before his death, he made plans to star in a production of Shakespeare's King Lear with his three actress daughters Angela, Polly Jo, and Miranda, but sadly it never came to pass.

by Rob Nixon