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The British character actor Ronan Vibert, who has died aged 58 after a brief illness, made his most impressive entrance in Saving Mr Banks, the 2013 live-action Disney film about PL (Pamela) Travers, author of the Mary Poppins books.
In the opening scene, set in 1961, the writer – played by Emma Thompson – lets her longtime publisher, Diarmuid Russell (Vibert), into her plush Georgian house in London and exchanges formal pleasantries (“Mr Russell”, “Mrs Travers”). In the battle of wills that follows Russell persuades a reluctant Travers, with no money or book ideas left, to sell the Mary Poppins film rights to Walt Disney, who has been chasing them for two decades.
“Sales have dried up … no more royalties … you refuse to write further books,” Russell frustratingly points out. Eventually she concedes: “I want to keep my house.”
Vibert’s well-built frame and authoritative air made him a natural for playing powerful characters. But whereas he was charming and persuasive in Saving Mr Banks, he was cold and brutal as Giovanni Sforza, lord of Pesaro and first husband of Lucrezia Borgia in the first two series (2011-12) of the international TV co-production The Borgias. Raping his wife on their wedding night and continuing to subject her to abuse and humiliation, Sforza is hated by all and eventually thrown out of the family, themselves notorious for the most heinous crimes, before his murder by Lucrezia’s brother, Cesare.
Vibert similarly brought fear to an earlier television role, as Robespierre, alongside Richard E Grant’s English aristocrat of the title, in The Scarlet Pimpernel. He ramped up the chilling nature of his evil character in the BBC’s French Revolution mini-series (1999-2000) by playing him calmly and without emotion.
Although audiences could rarely put a name to the actor’s face, one critic dubbed Vibert “Alan Rickman’s sexier younger brother”. Another described him as a cross between Rickman and Linus Roache.
Born in Cambridge, Ronan was the son of Dilys Jackson, an English-Scottish sculptor, and her husband, David Vibert, a Welsh painter. From the age of six he was brought up in Penarth, in the Vale of Glamorgan.
His own creativity shone through when he appeared in stage productions at Stanwell school in the south Wales seaside town. Starring as Dracula was particularly memorable for one fellow pupil, who recalled: “When all we saw was a claw-like hand coming out of the stage curtain, he nearly finished off half the audience!”
After graduating from Rada in 1985, Vibert proved to be a prolific supporting actor in British TV series. His roles ranged from the philandering aristocrat Lord Richard Marable in The Buccaneers (1995) and a doctor providing a false alibi for a colleague in Waking the Dead (in 2005), to a lorry-driving murder suspect in New Tricks (in 2013) and Lord Wellington in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2015). He also played Victor, the creature’s creator, in the 2003 TV movie Frankenstein: Birth of a Monster.
But Vibert often found more challenging roles in American-produced dramas. He followed the part of a millionaire art collector in Highlander: The Raven (in 1999) by acting Mark Antony’s general Lepidus for Rome’s second series (2007); Perry Cline, a lawyer seeking revenge on one of the two feuding families, in the mini-series Hatfields & McCoys (2012); and the rich landowner Sir Geoffrey Hawkes, who falls under the sway of a charismatic witch, in the second series (2015) of Penny Dreadful, featuring some of literature’s most terrifying characters.
His film parts included Wolfgang Muller, a camera operator shooting the Dracula movie Nosferatu, in Shadow of the Vampire (2000); Joseph Willicombe, the press baron William Randolph Hearst’s private secretary, in The Cat’s Meow (2001); Andrzej Bogucki, who helps Adrien Brody’s Polish-Jewish musician to go into hiding during the Nazi occupation of the Warsaw ghetto, in The Pianist (2002); and an MI6 agent in Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life (2003).
Vibert also played the boss of Michael Fassbender’s alcoholic Norwegian detective in the disappointing 2017 film The Snowman. When the grizzled sleuth longs for a complex crime to solve, Vibert’s dry response perhaps sums up the movie: “I apologise for Oslo’s low murder rate.”
The 1993 Channel 4 documentary Dracula: The Undiscovered Country, exploring the origins of Bram Stoker’s vampire, gave Vibert, as storyteller, the chance to revisit the character he played at school – and travel on a journey himself. The Guardian TV critic Nancy Banks-Smith relished seeing his transformation on screen from “hungry but well-brushed” to “unshaven, dishevelled, red-eyed and given to vulpine smiles”.
Vibert moved to Florida in 2021. He is survived by his wife, Jess Grand, whom he married in 2013, his parents and his brother, Cevn.
English (US)