Like a meteor
Memories of Peter Ustinov. By Roger Willemsen
There is one episode in the life of Peter Ustinov that reveals a lot about him. He had been shooting a portrait about Indira Gandhi for BBC's triple part documentary series "Ustinov's People" in India. While he was waiting for the appointed interview, he talked freely into the camera, something like: "So, I am standing in the garden of Indira Gandhi. There are birds in the trees. Guards are standing in the corners. It is quiet." Suddenly, there was noise, a big commotion. Ustinov: "Oh, I hear a sound. People are straying around, the guards are running. But I do not think that something bad has happened." The screen fell dark, then lit up again. Ustinov was standing at the same position: "I have to admit: When I just said, nothing bad has happened, I did not believe it myself. Indira Gandhi has just been shot at. The guards are no longer standing in the corners. But the birds are still in the trees."
Actually, Indira Gandhi was shot on her way to the interview with Peter Ustinov. Any documentarian would have rushed to the scene with a hand camera, but Peter Ustinov stayed away from that location, yet he was much closer to the event. "The birds are still in the trees" – with this sentence, with this mixture of literatism and pathos, he became unforgettable to me.
Being a cosmopolitan – only few may claim this. Ustinov liked to tell he was conceived in Leningrad, born in London and christened in Schwaebisch Gmuend. He probably regarded himself as Russian, and English was the language nearest to him. Still, he believed in the richness of the German language reaching from the Categorical Imperative to the "Alles klar" of the language yuppies.
A kind of humour arising from compassion and humanity
Not only was Ustinov citizen of the whole world, but also of all eras. He expanded himself through times and rooms in an awing manner. Cultural history was his nutrient fluid. At home in Roman history as well as in Renaissance painting or in contemporary comedy, there was no field which he had not been interested in. Osmotically, he let the world of both the present and the past diffuse into him, participated in everything like an anthropologist, to transform it into humour. For me, Ustinov has always been like a meteor that suddenly thundered down to earth and rose there like a stone block. However, he did not only bring a very hard to grasp quantity of intelligence with him, from childhood on he virtually nourished himself from readings, absorbed the world around him quicker than anybody else around him and, from all that, extracted an entertainer's attitude. Thus, he became the man who plundered the seriousness of cultural history and never dismissed his audience without a laugh.
Presumably, Ustinov in the first place was an author. Writing demanded the most of him, he had to wrestle with it, had to suffer from it. Acting, however, was like a bee's flight to him: You suck honey from everywhere and yet go home hungry in the evening.
As a multi-crop farmer in entertainment, he flourished in shifting forms, and I always had the notion that this mirrored accent changes of the same artistic agitation. Ustinov was the rare multi-talent without suffering from vying forces. During production, in the state of creation, he made such a happy impression that you often thought he rather suffered most on the travels between performances. As soon as he entered a stage, he could let himself go and finally be in his very element, in Ustinov.
Down to the slightest nuance his humour steadily reminds of Oscar Wilde. It is this humour describing the worst thing of the reformation as Luther's bad taste of fashion. There was nothing he could not subject to ridiculousness, but not out of superiority or haughtiness, just out of empathy and fundamental philanthropy. His humour was human, patronizing was alien to him. In all this, Ustinov was wonderfully self-ironic and loved to deal impiously with his own life and person. Once he told of his secret childhood wishes: At first he wanted to become a car, later a lizard. Then he performed his wishes on stage, turned into car and a lizard – and made himself, old man that he was, roaring and honking, then prying and lambent, a ridiculous and grotesque figure.
From the beginning on, life for Ustinov possibly had been a sequence of different roles. The fat child had to save himself from his enemies by imitating them. If he wanted to be desired, all he had was his wit, his mind sparkling in aperçus, his excessively cumulated cultivation. Nevertheless, he always presented his funniest parts with big earnestness, with a solemnity that either tipped over into lapidarity – or into played amazement about the following laughter. Ustinov was not the man to join in the laughter, he rather looked friendly into the silence before the guffaw burst out and felt pretty confident. I never saw him being vain - on the contrary: I think his ego had shrunk over the years.
In cinema, he lent his pouchy face to dislikeable characters who all were not himself: Emperor Nero, the slave trader in Spartacus, and Hercule Poirot, a figure constantly spying and eavesdropping at keyholes. As his favourite role he named the taxi driver in Topkapi, a dubious, cowardly, submissive figure. He assimilated such types, actually became the transformer in whose multiple personality one would always suspect the eavesdropper and the conformist.
His jokes reached vertiginous heights. When he was knighted by the Queen, he said: "I'm deeply touched." When an interviewer later asked him: "Do you wish to be addressed as Sir Peter?" Ustinov answered: "Well, I am not touched that deeply." This was something he was great at: Underplaying ceremoniousness, even when he himself was celebrated.
There was nearly no situation without Eros to him. I dare say he would have claimed to be ready to perform at any age. With his permanent appetite for the outside world, as a never-tired observer of all signs of the times, he even made an advertisement for the Expo with Verona Feldbusch – but nothing stuck on him. This was another indicator for the mystery of his personality. Ustinov defined the social and medial room in which he performed - and not vice versa. He could have even taken part in the German counterpart of the TV show "All you need is love" – surely it would have at once become a different show. For most actors the formats in which they appear are bigger than themselves. With Ustinov, it was always the other way round. He was the Pater Patriae and ironic until the end. It was only when he talked about humanity, about human dignity and human rights that the fun came to an end. This, finally, was serious.
"The only home that counts is civilised behaviour"
It is very likely that Ustinov was an ironist so he did not need to be a tragedian because for tragedy he was lacking the prerequisite pathos. He could act in a lofty manner but I do not think that life as a whole had much pathos to him. Saving life in its double meaning - spiritually and creaturely - was a task cultural history had bequeathed to him. Ustinov could not read Goethe without supporting the humanistic imperative. He was humanist to the core, and he took his role as an UNICEF ambassador very seriously without interpreting it as the role of a missionary. Gently, just by infecting others he could persuade people into seeing beauty. He did not need a raised forefinger. He did not review but interacted through what he mirrored.
It was probably the Germans who loved Ustinov most. Maybe because he always defended the Germans, as he, like Yehudi Menuhin, had been convinced that Germany had changed. And so with his wonderful British mockery he brightened up their own status for the Germans. Ustinov knew the "German soul" with their constant brooding about which Goethe once stated: "Die Deutschen werden schwer über allem, und alles wird schwer über ihnen." (The Germans get heavy upon everything, and everything gets heavy upon them.")
He was a renaissance man and sounded from another time. Saying something like this is rather unfortunate as you get a feeling as if you were dying a little with him. But an educational biography like Peter Ustinov's is scarcely imaginable today. Nowadays, it seems that people like him are no longer born. I at least do not know any other artist who has found such a fortunate balance between humanity and irony. Nobody who could bring together high culture and entertainment in such a dinosaur-like manner. I do not know anyone who was so at home in so many fields on such a high level. Not because he annexed them but rather because he lived on them.
And Ustinov was discreet. There was no end to his discreetness. I always had the feeling that to him suffering was something very intimate that could be resolved only when it was stylised to a running gag. Being asked where he wanted to live he once said: "Where you can hear the apples fall in autumn." However, he did not need a home. "The only home that counts is civilised behaviour." Was he pious? Rather not. When he was asked what he wanted written on his tombstone he said: "Please don't step on the grass." The only transcendence he knew was the religion of arts. He spoke enthusiastically of pictures, opera arias, of big constellations in big novels. His heaven certainly was spiritual in no other meaning than an artistic one, and talking about it, again, would have been too intimate to him.
Just like he rarely spoke about death seriously. I once saw him backstage in Baden-Baden, in a state of total exhaustion that showed him inconvertible, extinguished. He sat there like a sculpture from Easter Island, staring. Simply no longer present. He looked like a piece of prop. In that moment, you would have thought that life was too heavy for him to bear. The only thing he could still bear was the stage.
Source: "DIE ZEIT" on April 1, 2004
© Roger Willemsen
