Here is the Sir Peter Ustinov with whom everybody is comfortable: The double Oscar-winning character actor, citizen of the world and master raconteur enjoying, as the pun goes, his anecdotage: “A goat,” he breezes, “fell in love with me during a voodoo ceremony I witnessed while we were filming ‘The Comedians.’ A drunken goat, of course, it wouldn’t be a sober one. I got on to a table to get rid of it, and it climbed on to the table as well, and butted me affectionately. When the voodoo chief cut the throat of a hen, and blood splattered all over the place, I got down and left the room, and to my horror, the goat followed me. I went to my rented car and opened the door. The goat climbed in. So I shut the door, phoned Hertz and said, ‘You can come and fetch the car now.’ And I hailed a taxi home. Since that day, I have been unable to eat goat’s cheese.”
And here’s the Sir Peter Ustinov who makes some people grind their teeth: The outspoken UNICEF ambassador, quibbling with George W. Bush’s description of Palestinian bombers as “cowardly”: “They require the kind of courage that none of us would have. It’s a kind of courage that’s very hard to understand. And it’s our duty to try to understand it because it is the courage of desperation. And what is the difference between somebody who goes into a coffee house with the intention of killing as many people as possible — and does so — and somebody who’s in an aeroplane at the height of five miles, unobtainable by any anti-aircraft gun, and lets their bombs drop as scientifically as possible, in order to kill as few people as possible? I guarantee that the one who tries to kill as few people as possible will kill many more than the one who goes into a snack bar and blows himself or herself up. But in this campaign, I wonder how many of the people who have been killed were terrorists? I think very, very few. To my mind, it’s a big lie.”
It’s a fierce, hazy day on the shore of Lake Geneva. From Ustinov’s garden, where we sit, at a table set up under a plane tree, the view usually stretches as far as Mont Blanc and Lausanne. Today, the air is so occluded with vapor that the world stops at a band of shimmering water beyond the slopes of Ustinov’s vineyards. A pair of Swiss wasps is buzzing around us, so he sends his housekeeper across the lawn for a can of insecticide.
“I don’t want to kill them,” he says, in the voice of a belligerent American general. “Just use a bit of dissuasive force.” The housekeeper, however, is somewhat overzealous: He blasts the insects with the spray, and they dither to their deaths on the grass.
The Ustinovs — Sir Peter and his third wife, Helene du Lau D’Allemans — have lived here in the long, low farmhouse, piled with books, newspapers and lifetime-achievement awards, since 1980. They married in 1972 — once Ustinov had secured a divorce from his second wife, the actress Suzanne Cloutier — and have three children, Pavla, Igor and Andrea. Tamara, the offspring of his first marriage, to Isolde Denham, is a frequent visitor. Ustinov moved to Switzerland from London in the early 1960s, and the family is so much a fixture of the local landscape that its presence is noted in the Rough Guide to the area. Ustinov is dismayed to learn this: Peace and quiet, he says, is what he came here for. The lenient tax regime, of course, was an attraction too: It proved extremely useful when he was obliged to fund his second divorce with the proceeds of some television ads. “Life in England,” he explains, “became very difficult.” Fame, it seems, was exacting too many demands. Switzerland also suits him because it is attuned to his sensibilities in more subtle ways. His cosmopolitanism, his multilingualism, his wide-ranging artistic and diplomatic interests, his aspiration to the condition of exile — of statelessness — all appear more logical to the Swiss than they ever did to the British, in whose country he was born to immigrant parents, thanks to a series of unfortunate events.
He once described himself as having “too many eggs and not enough basket,” a phrase that now inspires that distinctive Ustinovian cringe: A 360 degree turn of his entire mouth, while spreading his fingers into the air. “Oh dear,” he says, mortified. “That sounds vain to me. As if I’m comparing myself to caviar.” But the phrase is not necessarily evidence of self-regard. Eggs, after all, can sometimes be rotten.
“I’m not really an ambitious person,” he contends. “The only ambition I ever realized was playing King Lear in Ontario. But my interests are now so spread that I seem to be living several lives in parallel.” The broader public has always admired this quality. They made his biography, “Dear Me” (1977), a bestseller and adored his one-man shows.
But the effortlessness with which Ustinov has slipped between a number of cultural roles — playwright, screenwriter, mimic, novelist, film and stage actor, chat-show guest, opera director, travel writer, television presenter, filmmaker, political campaigner, charity worker — has sometimes aroused the suspicions of those who have spent a lifetime pursuing only one or two of those activities.
The British tend to mistrust versatility, although the word with which we express our disapproval is borrowed from the French. “(Ustinov) has few ideas,” the Oxford historian Mark Almond once sniped in The Spectator, “and they are wrong but repeated at length.” “What he seems best at,” wrote another detractor, the late Martyn Harris, “is portraying a character called Peter Ustinov who is warm, cultivated, cosmopolitan, an inexhaustible fund of anecdote, and slightly cleverer than the real Peter Ustinov.” Ustinov is prepared for that one. Is he a dilettante? “I’m a chameleon,” he twinkles. “A light chameleon.”
Ustinov is the sort of chameleon whose views are regularly reported in newspapers. The first hour of our interview is entirely taken up with politics, with which he deals in epigrammatic form.
Ustinov on US politics: “The American people seem quite comfortable with Bush. Which can only mean one thing. That Bill Clinton was a president of quite unnecessary brilliance.”
Ustinov on Russo-American relations: “There was a great campaign to make life difficult for Vladimir Putin when he came in. Nobody ever mentions that George Bush senior was head of the CIA. What’s the difference between the CIA and the KGB? Except that probably the KGB are more thorough, intelligent, and more respectful of foreign traditions.”
The Middle East is on his mind. He recalls how he visited Oslo during the signing of the peace accords, to interview Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Perez. “I said to Rabin: ‘Your terrorists and Palestinians militants are sworn enemies, and yet, de facto, they’re on the same side, because what they want is the same thing, they want the destruction to go on. They are a very small minority. Why can’t you make the effort? Intelligent Israelis and intelligent Arabs — can’t you get together and outlaw this sort of thing?’ And he said to me: ‘You make one big mistake. The only terrorists are Palestinians. And I tell you why. No Jew would ever raise his gun against another Jew.’ And five weeks later he was dead. So much for folklore.”
For Ustinov, the desire of a person to live in a land that they feel, somehow, belongs to them, is an incomprehensible foible. “I was born as an exile,” he says. “And I’ve been an exile ever since. Refugees are tragic, or at least dramatic, when they’re in a mass. But one refugee at a time can be at an enormous advantage, if he knows how to handle himself.”
Identities that are interstitial, mixed, nomadic, are the kind that appeal to Ustinov. He wears the cosmopolitanism of his own background as a tiara of pride, in which his Ethiopian grandmother is the most glittering jewel. Studded elsewhere in this arrangement are a great aunt who was lady-in-waiting to Haile Selassie, a great uncle who designed for the Ballet Russes, and worked with Diaghilev, and a great-great-great-grandfather, who was “Maitre de Bouche” to Emperor Paul I of Russia. Inevitably, when you try to imagine these figures, they become a Kind Hearts and Coronets gallery of Peter Ustinovs, individuated only by wigs, epaulettes and costume brooches.
This is how Peter Ustinov came into the world. In the spring of 1920, Jona von Ustinov, an officer in the German Air Force — who had, perversely, been born in Jaffa to a Russo-German father and Swiss-Ethiopian mother — arrived in Leningrad to search for his parents, who had travelled to the city from Turkish Palestine, and gone missing in the uproar of the Russian Civil War. Despite his inability to speak the local language, he quickly discovered their fates. His father, flushed with patriotic fervor, had joined his old regiment, and succumbed to starvation. His mother, who also knew little Russian, was unable to explain herself satisfactorily, and had been thrown into jail. Thankfully, a Commissar Ivan Maisky answered Jona’s overtures by giving him a brace of herrings wrapped in an old copy of Izvestia, and releasing his mother from prison. Jona dispatched his mother to Cairo, and, as this grave matter had been addressed with comparative ease, had time to attend a few parties. At one of these he met an architect’s daughter named Nadezdha Leontievna Benois. After a fortnight’s courtship, the couple married — he in tennis trousers and a blazer, she in her grandmother’s nightdress. A few months later she was pregnant with a son. Commisar Miasky came to their rescue once more, procuring the couple false documents that allowed them to travel to Amsterdam, where they planned to start a new life together.
Jona quickly secured a job as London correspondent for a German news agency and left Amsterdam immediately to prepare a flat in Redcliffe Gardens for the arrival of his family. In February 1921, Nadezdha Ustinov landed at Harwich. “She arrived one pea-soup-fog night,” relates the boy whom she carried in her belly, “very nervous, for she could hardly move with the encumbrance that I caused, and didn’t understand why every railway station between Harwich and London seemed to be called ‘Bovril’. That sort of amazement followed me into life.”
In a nursing home in Swiss Cottage, on April 16, 1921, Peter Ustinov popped into the world, the only child his parents would produce. Twenty years later, on the day that Germany invaded Russia, James Agate, theater critic of The Sunday Times, issued a rave notice of his first play, “Home of Regrets,” having only read the script. It was not produced until two years later.
A kind of Wellesian luminosity surrounded Ustinov in the early years of his career. He sold his first screenplay at 24, directed his first film, “School for Secrets,” at 25, and became a star at 30, fiddling while Rome burned in “Quo Vadis?” Hollywood decided that he looked his best in a toga, and cast him in “Spartacus” (1960), for which he won an Oscar. Another little man was pressed into his hands in 1965, for the crime caper “Topkapi” (1964). His greatest achievement in the cinema, an adaptation of Melville’s “Billy Budd” (1962), brought the world’s attention to a nervous young actor named Terence Stamp. Ustinov is still acting — he has just finished shooting a biopic of Martin Luther, opposite Joseph Fiennes, and another film, with Jeanne Moreau, is on the cards — but the movies long ago ceased to be the focus of his attention.
In the late 1960s, Ustinov was asked to act as master of ceremonies at a UNICEF concert in Paris. He knew little about the organization, but a Yugoslav journalist persuaded him that it was work worth doing. Over the decades, his appetite for social and political reform has grown: He is now the organization’s oldest working goodwill ambassador, and has just returned from an EGM of the UN, at which he bent Kofi Annan’s ear about his latest scheme.
Ustinov plans to use the resources of his charitable institute, the Peter Ustinov Foundation, to introduce a new subject to the curricula of the world’s universities: The study of prejudice. A chair in the subject has already been inaugurated at the University of Budapest, and 20 students at Durham University — where Ustinov has been rector and chancellor, on and off, since 1968 — now receive scholarships to research the nature of “inherited opinion.” Thirty other institutions, he asserts, are interested in participating in his project. “At my age,” he reflects, “it seems quite a logical thing to do.” The foundation has also established a hospital for the treatment of Noma, a flesh-wasting disease that afflicts children living in unsanitary conditions, and funds a scheme which exports wheelchairs to Nepal. “But it’s all patchwork,” he says, “and I suddenly found a need to get to the root of all this nonsense. Why do people behave in certain ways, all over the world, in conflicts from Kosovo to Rwanda?” He says that he’d be quite happy if “Keep off the Grass” was all that was written on his tombstone. But intimations of mortality, I think, explain the increased urgency of his work. Most other actors his age would now be hunkering down over their memoirs. With little time for such navel-gazing, he has delegated the task of recording his life to an official biographer, John Miller, whose book, “The Gift of Laughter,” will be published in September.
At 81, Ustinov has finally reached the age that, as a performer, he has been counterfeiting since his teens. He recently had an eye operation that didn’t work as well as it might have done: He now wears a pair of acid-yellow specs, and, when we return to the house for espresso and chocolate, he updates himself on the sport results by hunching over a television placed on the coffee table in front of his armchair. “I am well prepared, and, I must say, rather unsurprised by old age. There are only one or two things that I didn’t anticipate. A sort of panic, occasionally. And with jetlag, I found I couldn’t sleep at all. And that’s never happened before. And,” he continues, “I can’t walk properly any more. I have to use a...” (he trails off, as if he can’t quite bring himself to say the word, which could equally be stick, or wheelchair) “...especially in airports.
“I was asked recently if I had any regrets. There is one thing. About 30 years ago I was in Israel making a film. I was fetching my breakfast from the buffet in the hotel when I sensed someone moving behind me at express speed, with the velocity and application of a charging rhino. And it was Ariel Sharon. I made a gesture for him to pass and he ignored that and shoved straight past me. And I’ve always regretted — especially in the light of what’s happened since — that I didn’t put my foot out, and send him and his breakfast cascading to the ground.” His mountainous frame judders with rebellious laughter. (The Independent)