Denholm Elliott

Denholm Mitchell Elliott was born on 31 May 1922 in Kensington, London, the son of Nina Elliott (née Mitchell; 1893–1966) and Myles Layman Farr Elliott, MBE (1890–1933), a barrister who had studied law and Arabic at Cambridge and served with the Gloucestershire Regiment at Gallipoli and in Mesopotamia. In 1930, Myles Elliott was appointed solicitor-general to the Mandatory Government in Palestine, and three years later he was assassinated outside the King David Hotel, following a series of controversial government prosecutions. He was buried in the Protestant Cemetery on Mount Zion. Elliott's elder brother, Neil Emerson Elliott (1920–2003), worked as a land agent to Lady Anne Cavendish-Bentinck.

Elliott attended Malvern College before enrolling at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, where he was asked to leave after a single term. During the Second World War he joined the Royal Air Force, training as a wireless operator and air gunner with No. 76 Squadron RAF under the command of Leonard Cheshire. On the night of 23–24 September 1942, his Handley Page Halifax DT508 took part in a raid on the pens at Flensburg, Germany, was struck by flak, and ditched in the North Sea near Sylt. Elliott and four crewmates survived, and he spent the remainder of the war as a prisoner at Stalag Luft VIIIb in Lamsdorf, Silesia. While imprisoned he organized amateur theatrical productions, forming a theatre group that toured other POW camps performing Twelfth Night.

Following his film debut in Dear Mr. Prohack (1949), Elliott built a stage career that brought him to Broadway, where he performed from 1950 to 1967. His Broadway credits included Ring Round the Moon, in which he played the twin brothers in Jean Anouilh's play, as well as Write Me a Murder, The Green Bay Tree, Tonight at 8:30, A Touch of the Poet, and The Imaginary Invalid, among other productions. Originally from London, he brought his stage experience on both sides of the Atlantic to a wide range of roles throughout his career.

On screen, Elliott took on parts that included an officer in The Cruel Sea (1953), a criminal abortionist in Alfie (1966), and a washed-up film director in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974). He portrayed Dr. Marcus Brody, an academic and friend of Indiana Jones, in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and reprised the role in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). A photograph of the character appears in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), with a reference made to Brody's death, and a statue was dedicated to the character outside Marshall College, the fictional school where Indiana Jones teaches.

During the 1980s Elliott received three consecutive BAFTA Awards for Best Supporting Actor: for playing the butler to Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy in Trading Places (1983), Dr. Swaby in A Private Function (1984), and the drunken journalist Vernon Bayliss in Defence of the Realm (1986). His performance as Mr. Emerson in A Room with a View (1985) earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. On television, he won the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in 1981 and received a second nomination for Hotel du Lac (1986). His television work also included plays by Dennis Potter — among them Follow the Yellow Brick Road (1972), Brimstone and Treacle (1976), and Blade on the Feather (1980) — as well as the BBC adaptation of Charles Dickens's The Signalman (1976), the television film The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1968) with Jack Palance, Mrs. Delafield Wants to Marry (1986) with Katharine Hepburn and Harold Gould, Bangkok Hilton (1989) with Nicole Kidman, and the 1988 miniseries Codename: Kyril, in which he played the Russian mole Povin. He and Natasha Parry played the lead roles in the 1955 television play The Apollo of Bellac, and he took over for an ill Michael Aldridge for one season of The Man in Room 17 (1966).

In 1988, Queen Elizabeth II appointed Elliott a Commander of the Order of the British Empire for his services to acting. His stage work included performances with the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Elliott married twice. His first marriage, to actress Virginia McKenna, lasted from 1954 to 1957. In 1962 he married American actress Susan Robinson, twenty years his junior; the marriage was open, and the couple had two children. Elliott was diagnosed with HIV in 1987 and died of tuberculosis on 6 October 1992 at his home in Santa Eulària des Riu on Ibiza, aged 70. Tributes were paid by actors Donald Sinden and Peter Ustinov, dramatist Dennis Potter, and his first wife Virginia McKenna. Following his death, his widow established the Denholm Elliott Project charity and collaborated closely with the UK Coalition of People Living with HIV and AIDS. She died on 12 April 2007, aged 65, in a fire at her flat in Hornsey, London. Their daughter Jennifer died by suicide in Ibiza in 2003.