'Goldfinger' actor Martin Benson obituary
09-Mar-2010 • Actor News
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Highlights in a career that spanned 60 years, and more than 150 films and television series, include Yul Brynner's vizier Kralahome in The King and I (1956), Elizabeth Taylor's military commander Ramos in Cleopatra (1963) and Father Spiletto, the priest who persuades Gregory Peck to adopt little orphan called Damien in The Omen (1976).
One of his most enduring roles was as the nervous, pipe-smoking Mr Solo in the James Bond classic Goldfinger (1964).
After Solo is killed, James Bond remarks that he had had "a pressing engagement".
James Bond's creator Ian Fleming liked the name Solo so much that he suggested reusing it for the main character when he became involved in the development of a secret agent television series. The series was actually going to be called Solo.
Eon Productions, the James Bond film company, was unhappy and initiated legal action. The TV series became The Man from UNCLE, although Robert Vaughn's character retained the name Napoleon Solo.
Martin Benson was born into a Jewish immigrant family in 1918, in London, where his father was a shopkeeper. During the Second World War, he served in the army in Europe and North Africa. He was captured at Dunkirk, but managed to escape.
While in the army, he developed an interest in acting and while serving in Egypt formed an amateur drama group, along with Arthur Lowe, who would later play Captain Mainwaring in Dad's Army. They reputedly staged Shakespeare plays for Egypt's King Farouk.
After the war Benson trained as a pharmacist with Boots the Chemists and was in his early thirties when his professional acting career really took off. But in the late 1940s and early 1950s his sharp nose and exotic features began to secure him supporting roles in films, playing a variety of foreigners, at a time when there were comparatively few foreigners around in the British film industry to fill them.
"In my 30s I thought I could do anything in films," he said. "I wrote a book on film acting when I barely knew the left of the camera from the right. This prompted some fledgling actors to apply to me for training. I don't think they suffered any harm and some went on to greater things."
After several years of beavering away in bit parts, the role he landed in The King and I represented a huge breakthrough for Benson. He first played the role of the stern, but good-hearted vizier in the original 1953 London West End stage production.
As guest of honour at the opening of an amateur production in Dunstable, Bedfordshire, in 2008, he said: "The King and I has been part of my life for a long time. I spent two years in Drury Lane with Herbert Lom and Valerie Hobson and then went to Hollywood to make the film."
Other major roles followed, both in film and on TV. He had the regular role of the villain, the Duke de Medici in the swashbuckling ITV series Sword of Freedom (1957-58), he was the Maharajah of Rhanda in the comedy Doctor at Large (1957) and had the dubious distinction of appearing in Cleopatra, which at the time was the most expensive film ever made and almost bankrupted 20th Century Fox.
He played another crook in A Shot in the Dark (1964), the follow-up to The Pink Panther, and made regular guest appearances on some of British television's most popular shows.
Over the years he turned up in The Saint (1963-67), Danger Man (1965), The Professionals (1978), The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1981) â almost unrecognisable behind heavy make-up as the alien captain Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz â as well as Last of the Summer Wine (1998) and Casualty (2005).
Benson developed a niche playing Middle Eastern roles. One of the most notable was as Abu Jahl in The Message, the big-budget 1976 film about Mohammed. It starred Anthony Quinn, as Mohammad's uncle Hamza.
It was financed by Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi and suffered from (among other things) adhering to the Islamic convention that Mohammed could not be shown on screen.
Benson also made short factual and promotional films.
He is survived by his wife, Joy, three daughters, a son, two stepdaughters and a stepson.
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