Tutte Lemkow

A dancer first, and the casting never forgot it. Tutte Lemkow, born in Oslo in 1918, worked mostly in British film and television and mostly in villainous or exotic parts, hired for a body and a face rather than for dialogue. The credits read like a list of things a choreographer would be asked to do: a Kazak dancer in A Shot in the Dark, Aicha's partner in the 1952 Moulin Rouge, a strangler in The Wrong Box, a leper in Ben-Hur, a wizard in Red Sonja.

Two images made him familiar to people who have never heard his name. He is the fiddler in the 1971 film of Fiddler on the Roof, a wordless figure on a roofline that the whole story hangs its title on. And he is the old man in Raiders of the Lost Ark who translates the inscription on the headpiece of the Staff of Ra, a single scene that every viewer of that film can recall. Neither part needed him to say much. Both needed a presence that looked like it had come from somewhere older than the film around it.

He worked constantly in enormous productions without ever being billed high: Nicolai in The Guns of Navarone, Orestes in The Moon-Spinners, Frenchie LeBec in Inspector Clouseau, Pierre in Woody Allen's Love and Death, Tewfik Hamdi in Sphinx. Some of it was uncredited, including the Ben-Hur part and Bonjour Tristesse. He died in 1991.