Peter Ustinov, the renowned actor whose 60-year career included Oscar-winning roles in "Spartacus" and "Topkapi," has died. He was 82.
Ustinov, who later became a U.N. goodwill ambassador, died of heart failure late Sunday in a Swiss clinic at Genolier, near his home in a mountain village overlooking Lake Geneva, close friend Leon Davico told The Associated Press.
"He was a great man. He a human being. He was a unique person, someone you could really count on," said Davico, a former U.N. spokesman.
Ustinov's film roles included a nomad in the outback who befriends a family in "The Sundowners," a one-eyed slave in "The Egyptian," Agatha Christie's Belgian detective Hercule Poirot in "Death on the Nile," and Abdi Aga, an illiterate tyrant with pretensions of learning in "Memed My Hawk."
One of his best-loved roles was as the Chinese sleuth in the "Charlie Chan" series. Ustinov won Hollywood Oscars for the role of Batiatus, owner of the gladiator school in "Spartacus" (1960), and as Arthur Simpson, an English small-time black marketeer in Turkey who gets caught up in a jewel heist in "Topkapi" (1965).
Michael Winner, who directed Ustinov in the 1988 movie "Appointment With Death," described the actor as a "marvelous man, a great wit, a great raconteur, a man of the world." "He was a very good actor but he wasn't used as an actor as much as he should have been because he became famous as Peter Ustinov," Winner told The Associated Press in a phone interview.
Ustinov played sleuth Hercule Poirot in Winner's adaptation of the Agatha Christie story.
"He was forever imitating people and telling jokes, so he sometimes forgot to learn the lines, which was annoying," Winner said. "I always enjoyed being with him."
Born in London on April 16, 1921, the only son of a Russian artist mother and a journalist father, Ustinov claimed also to have Swiss, Ethiopian, Italian and French blood -- everything except English.
His imposing figure, variously described as resembling a teddy bear and a giant panda, began 12 pounds at birth and stayed with him throughout his career.
Ustinov was performing by age 3, mimicking politicians of the day when his parents invited Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie for dinner.
He was educated at the prestigious Westminster School, but hated it and left at 16. He made his stage debut in London in 1940, when he was 19. Ustinov turned producer at 21, presenting "Squaring the Circle" shortly before he entering the British army in 1942.
If his plays had a continuing theme, it was a celebration of the little man bucking the system. One of his most successful was "The Love of Four Colonels" which ran for two years in London's West End.
Davico, who was starting his career with UNICEF, asked Ustinov to join the U.N. children's agency as a goodwill ambassador after seeing the play.
"He was not just a writer and actor. He was someone who really tried to help," Davico said. "He was not only the funniest person I've ever met, but the most intelligent. He was an attentive citizen of the world."
Ustinov later became a staunch advocate for UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Ustinov's long service as a goodwill ambassador with the United Nations led U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan to joke that Ustinov was the man to take over from him.
In a movie career lasting some 60 years, Ustinov appeared in roles ranging from Emperor Nero to Agatha Christie's Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. He won Academy Awards for supporting actor in the films "Spartacus" and "Topkapi" in the 1960s.
More recently he was the voice of Babar the Elephant, played the role of a doctor in the film "Lorenzo's Oil", and in 1999 appeared as the Walrus to Pete Postlethwaite's Carpenter in a multimillion-dollar TV movie version of Alice in Wonderland.
No immediate details funeral arrangements were available.