Peter Cushing

Born: 1913
Where: Kenley, Surrey
Died: 1994

This gaunt, incisive character actor is best known as Hammer's leading man in a string of great British horror movies - or as Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars.

But he made his screen debut with a supporting part in James Whale's excellent 1939 adaptation of The Man in the Iron Mask.

Cushing played in several other American films before returning home during WWII and eventually became a member of Laurence Olivier's acting company at the Old Vic Theater.

He continued acting in cinema regularly on both sides of the Atlantic beginning with John Huston's fine biopic of Toulouse-Lautrec, Moulin Rouge and continued with The Black Knight and Joseph Losey's gripping Time Without Pity.

But his big break came when the Hammer Studios decided to revive the Horror genre with a series of rather gorier and more overtly sexy remakes of earlier classics. For The Curse of Frankenstein they needed someone for Dr. Frankenstein who would be very much at home in period English garb and who could convey nervous tension and intelligence combined with a genuine if slightly skewed integrity.

Cushing, with his thin lips, piercing stare and unusually high cheekbones, proved ideal for the part, and it transformed his career. Starring opposite Christopher Lee as the monster, Cushing became, along with Lee and Vincent Price, one of the reigning kings of screen terror.

Having tackled the Frankenstein myth, Hammer, Cushing and Lee next set their sights on Dracula. The darker, younger Lee cut a dashing figure as the vampire count, while Cushing, as Dr. Van Helsing, was the genteel but strong, stiff-upper-lipped quality English gentleman.

Over the next two decades, Cushing would play both Frankenstein and Van Helsing several times, and in more than 30 horror films would generally alternate between crafty, sometimes insane but always well-spoken villains and sturdily heroic doctors and investigators forced to confront monsters.

Cushing also made an excellent Sherlock Holmes opposite Lee's villainous Baskerville in a solid 1959 remake of The Hound of the Baskervilles and the dynamic duo would team up almost 20 times in films - sometimes good (Dr. Terror's House of Horrors, I Monster, The Creeping Flesh), sometimes bad (The Satanic Rites of Dracula, The House of the Long Shadows) and indifferent (The Skull, Scream and Scream Again).

Through the mid-60s Cushing played good roles in non-horror films (witness his fine work as a bank clerk turned robber in the admirable suspenser Cash on Demand) but by the end of the decade was typed almost exclusively in fright fare.

To his great credit, Cushing always added class and did not become overly condescending to his material - in 1970 film critic Vincent Canby dubbed him "Hammer's Laurence Olivier".

In 1989 he was made and OBE - and in his later films including Star Wars - featuring that memorably icy shot of Cushing just before the Death Star explodes - and Biggles, Cushing made appearances which traded on his established persona, one which guaranteed solidly crafted and juicy thrills for more than a generation.