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CUSHING, PETER (1913–1994). British actor.
Acted in tv: Nineteen Eighty-Four
(tv movie) (Rudolph Cartier 1954); The
Abominable Snowman (tv movie) (1955); "The Caves of Steel"
(1964), episode of Story Parade;
"Return of the Cybernauts" (1967), episode of The
Avengers; "The Counterfeit Trap" (1973), episode of Zoo Gang; "La Grande Bretèche" (1973), episode
of Orson Welles Great Mysteries;
"Missing Link" ["Missing Uncle"] (1976), episode of Space: 1999; The Great Houdini
(tv movie) (Melville Shavelson 1976); "The Eagle's Nest" (1978),
episode of The New Avengers;
"The Silent Scream" (1980), episode of Hammer
House of Horrors; "The Vorpal Blade" (1982), episode
of Tales of the Unexpected; The Masks of Death (tv movie) (Baker 1984);
Doctor Who: More Than Thirty
Years in the Tardis (tv documentary) (1993); Flesh
and Blood: The Hammer Heritage of Horror (tv documentary;
narrator) (1994).
So it was that Cushing, a marvelous embodiment of this
philosophy, developed and imposed upon a series of films a unique and
unsettling interpretation of the character of Dr. Frankenstein, whom he
portrayed more often than any other actor. Although scripts fleetingly
obliged Cushing to mouth lines to the contrary, his Frankenstein has absolutely
no interest in playing God, advancing scientific progress, or improving
the human condition; instead, he keeps making monsters primarily because
he enjoys the process of making monsters. Totally indifferent to the results
of his work, he naturally keeps making idiotic mistakes, and he naturally
never learns from his mistakes—it doesn't really matter to him. After
the damage has been done, he methodically extracts himself from the mess
he has made, travels to a distant town, and, under another assumed name,
once again throws himself into the pleasurable regimen of pouring chemicals
into test tubes, turning the dials of electronic gadgets, slicing up dead
bodies, and stuffing new organs into them. Truly, if Hannah Arendt had
not coined the phrase "the banality of evil" after watching the testimony
of Nazi war criminals, she might have done so after watching the Frankenstein
films of Peter Cushing.
This dedication to craftsmanship did not serve Cushing
well in another role he essayed more than once, Dracula's nemesis Professor
Van Helsing, since he could not convincingly spearhead a moral crusade
to rid the world of an intriguing phenomenon like predatory vampires.
However, he was unusually well suited to portray Sherlock Holmes, a figure
noted less for his passionate desire to track down criminals than for
his delight in playing "the game" of catching them; in addition, despite
complaints from some quarters, he was also reasonably good as Doctor Who,
another man who always seems interested in what he is doing but does not
always pay attention to the consequences of his actions. And Cushing was
perfectly cast in Star Wars
as a general of the evil Empire who is capable of supervising the day-to-day
business of constructing a Death Star while utterly lacking in Darth Vader's
ability to see the big picture.
Since Cushing was content to putter his way through life
and through films, focused on the details of the moment instead of the
big picture, and since he lacked the relentless drive to keep busy at
all costs displayed by his frequent co-star, the enigmatically empty Christopher
LEE, Cushing worked less frequently than Lee,
but usually with more satisfying results. If not asked to display too
much emotion, and instead assigned only to pay attention to the plot and
keep it in motion, he could provide efficient, effective, even mesmerizing
support, as shown by fondly remembered horror and science fiction films
like She, Tales from the Crypt,
Horror Express, At the Earth's Core, and Biggles: Adventures in Time, where his roles
precisely matched his talents. His range was demonstrated at an early
stage by his striking performance as Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four, where he was frighteningly
persuasive as a minor bureaucrat in the Ministry of Truth, calming sitting
in his cubicle and rewriting history, but theatrical and histrionic when
called upon to make fervent speeches expressing his cravings for liberty
and justice. Overall, one would have to say, his good performances far
outnumbered his bad ones, and he made his films better far more often
than he made them worse; thus, by a strict accounting, one must conclude
that his career was a success. |
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