Ian Charleson
A Scottish actor whose screen record is small and whose reputation is not. Ian Charleson (1949 to 1990) made his film debut in Derek Jarman's Jubilee (1978), playing Angel in what was then the least respectable corner of British cinema, and three years later he was Eric Liddell in Chariots of Fire.
Liddell is the part everything else gets measured against. The film needed someone who could make religious conviction read as conviction rather than as priggishness, and Charleson managed it by underplaying: the runner's refusal to compete on a Sunday lands as settled fact rather than as a speech. Gandhi (1982) asked for a version of the same thing, Reverend Charlie Andrews, decency without piety, in a film crowded with much larger performances.
After that the choices get stranger. He was Jeffson Brown in Greystoke (1984), Lockhart in the television serial Reilly: Ace of Spies (1983), and Marco in Dario Argento's Opera (1987), an Italian horror picture about as far from Cambridge athletics as a career can travel. He was a stage actor as much as a screen one, which is part of why this list is so short. He died in 1990.
Movies (5)
TV (1)
Where to start with Ian Charleson
There is really only one place to begin, and it is Chariots of Fire. Charleson's Liddell gives the film its moral centre, and he plays a man of faith without a single moment of condescension towards him. Follow it with Gandhi, where he has far less room and does the same trick in miniature.
Then go backwards to Jubilee, Derek Jarman's punk fantasia, which is abrasive, cheap and much more alive than its reputation suggests, and which shows what he was doing before respectability arrived. Opera is the curveball: Argento's opera-house horror is stylish and vicious, and Charleson is the sane man standing in the middle of it. Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes and Reilly: Ace of Spies are for completists, the first a handsome misfire, the second a well-regarded spy serial set in the early twentieth century.