London calling.
And today…
we begin, with your permission, in Switzerland.
A clinic in Genolier.
This day in 2004.
March 28th, 2004.
A great voice falls silent.
A great presence departs the stage.
And already you can hear the objection.
“Hang on. Switzerland?
This is London Calling.
What’s going on?”
Ah – but stay with me.
Because this is not,
in any meaningful sense,
a Swiss story.
This is a London story that happened to take its final bow abroad.
Let’s wind the clock back.
Way back.
To London. 1921.
Into the most gloriously improbable beginning
you could wish for.
Enter Peter Ustinov.
Or, to give him his full,
slightly operatic billing:
Peter Alexander Freiherr von Ustinov.
Even the name sounds like a casting decision,
arrives ready for applause.
And the background. Oh my goodness.
Conceived in Petrograd.
Born in London.
Baptised in Germany.
A man who seems to begin life already in motion.
His blood,
by his own reckoning,
an extraordinary cocktail –Russian, French, German, and then a scattering of Swiss,
Polish, Italian,
Portuguese, Ethiopian.
Not so much a family tree as a world map.
His father,
a journalist and diplomat,
later working in intelligence, bringing back information about German rearmament in the 1930s that would be described as priceless.
His mother,
an artist,
equally at ease in this swirl of cultures.
And all of it lands here.
London.
Of course it does.
He goes to Westminster School.
Briefly.
Because the real education is happening elsewhere.
Because he is already bursting with voices.
That’s the thing everyone says.
.
And here’s where it begins.
As a baby, he is left in his pram in a room with a caged parrot.
This is true.
While his nanny,
meant to be wheeling him about the park,
disappears downstairs to visit the parrot’s owner.
And the infant Ustinov…
chats to the parrot.
And the parrot chats back.
And somewhere in that extraordinary exchange –
human voice, bird voice,
mimicry, play –
the gift is born.
Because that is what Peter Ustinov becomes.
One of the great mimics of his age.
Not impressions.
Not party tricks.
Transformations.
A tilt of the head,
a shift of tone, and suddenly Churchill is in the room.
Or a Hollywood mogul.
Or a Balkan diplomat.
Entire conversations conjured out of thin air.
He starts young.
Teenage playwright.
Teenage actor.
And at nineteen,
why not, he marries.
Life already at full tilt.
Then the war.
And here,
a detail you simply could not invent.
For the sake of military form,
he is made batman to David Niven.
Yes.
Peter Ustinov,
future Oscar-winner and raconteur extraordinaire…
…batman to David Niven.
Which tells you something about the absurdity of war.
And something about
the kind of story
he would later tell about it.
After the war,
everything opens.
Theatre. Film. Writing. Directing.
Two Academy Awards.
A career that stretches across continents.
But he’s never just an actor.
He’s a storyteller.
A man who can hold a room with nothing more than his voice.
Michael Parkinson would later call him God’s gift to the talk-show host.
Which feels about right.
The roles come.
Nero –
magnificent, mischievous, entirely aware of the absurdity of power.
Poirot –
played not as a fussy caricature but as a man quietly amused by the human condition.
Six times he plays him.
Each time, something new glints.
And then the writing.
Plays. Novels. Essays.
An autobiography, Dear Me,
in which he gently mocks the idea of fixed spelling,
suggesting that insisting on it is a way of giving a living language rigor mortis.
Which feels very Ustinov.
The life expands.
Tennis. Fast cars.
Honours –
a CBE, then a knighthood.
And a reach that is genuinely global.
On his eightieth birthday,
tributes come in from figures like the Dalai Lama,
Mikhail Gorbachev, Václav Havel.
Not a bad guest list.
And moments when history intrudes.
Delhi, 1984.
He is wired up,
ready to interview Indira Gandhi.
And as she walks across the garden to meet him,
she’s assassinated.
You can’t prepare for that.
No one can.
And through it all, he remains what he always was.
A connector.
Kofi Annan once remarked that he could serve not only as Secretary-General of the United Nations,
but as the representative of all its member states.
Which tells you everything.
He was called,
in his time,
a prodigy.
An enfant terrible.
A genius.
And perhaps
most memorably of all –
The world’s laughter-maker-in-chief.
And yes, later years in Switzerland.
A quieter life.
A different tempo.
But by then,
the essential work had been done.
London had done its work.
So when we say that on this day, March 28th, 2004, he dies in Switzerland…
We are stating a fact.
But not the truth.
The truth is that Peter Ustinov belongs to London.
To that great,
teeming,
contradictory, generous city
that makes space for the improbable.
And occasionally produces the extraordinary.
London calling.
And remembering.
A man who contained multitudes.
And made them speak.
Ok, there you have it. That’s your London fix for today.
And, yes, you can count on it, another London story along at this time tomorrow.
Ah, yes, tomorrow’s London fix. Better put your trainers on… because we’re going for a bit of a run.
26 miles’ worth, as it happens.
The first London Marathon.
This is London. This is London Walks. Story time. History time. Streets Ahead.
See you tomorrow.