Sydney Bromley

A stage career that began in the 1920s left Sydney Bromley with the one thing British genre cinema kept needing: a face that looked like it had been left out in the weather. He was in the 1924 premiere of Shaw's Saint Joan on stage, and thirty-three years later he turned up in the 1957 film of it as Baudricourt's Steward. That is roughly the shape of the whole career. Small parts, more than sixty of them across film and television, no fuss.

The screen work runs from an uncredited soldier in Brief Encounter through Hammer (Captain Clegg, Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell), a Carry On, and two films for Roman Polanski: the sleigh driver in The Fearless Vampire Killers and the Porter in his Macbeth. That Porter is worth the detour. It is the one comic scene in Shakespeare's bleakest play, and Bromley plays it filthy and sour rather than winking, which is exactly what the film around it needs.

Then the fantasy boom found him. In 1981 he turned up twice, as Hodge in Dragonslayer and Alf in An American Werewolf in London, and in 1984 he played Engywook in The NeverEnding Story, delivering great slabs of exposition as though they were gossip he could barely keep to himself. He died in 1987. To a generation of children he is that one part and nothing else, an odd fate for a man who started out in Shaw.