Charles Gray had a voice made for narration and spent his career lending it to villains, narrators and men who thought highly of themselves. He is a pleasure to listen to and, as Blofeld, almost impossible to fear.
Fi1m perspective
Charles Gray always sounds as though he has read the script already and found it slightly beneath him. The voice is the whole instrument: deep, unhurried, every vowel given its full weight, the delivery of a man who has never in his life been interrupted. Directors borrowed it for narration and for dubbing other actors, Jack Hawkins among them, and he brings it unaltered to every part, whether he is summoning the devil or introducing The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) as its Criminologist. He seldom raises it. He does not need to.
He came to acting in his mid-twenties and learned the trade on stage, at Regent's Park, the Old Vic and Stratford, which is where the diction comes from. Film and television followed from the late 1950s, and 1967 was the year that changed things: The Night of the Generals and a small Bond part as Dikko Henderson in You Only Live Twice. The decade after was the busy one, more than forty productions between 1968 and 1979, opening with Mocata, the satanic priest of The Devil Rides Out (1968), and filled with the toffs, cads, crooks and braggarts that became his stock in trade. Later there was television, most durably as Mycroft Holmes opposite Jeremy Brett in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1984).
The voice is also the problem. As Ernst Stavro Blofeld in Diamonds Are Forever (1971) he plays the arch-villain as a club bore explaining the wine list, and we never believed he could hurt anyone. We sat through his scenes waiting to be frightened and were instead mildly entertained, the way one is by a stranger at dinner who knows too much about claret; the affectation that makes him funny as a narrator makes him harmless as a killer, and the delivery keeps tipping into camp. We found more menace in the film's two courteous hitmen than in their employer. It is a fair complaint about the whole career, not just the one film: audiences admired him more than they were moved by him, on stage as well as on screen.
There is a case for him as a villain, and by reputation it rests on Mocata in The Devil Rides Out, where the ice is said to hold. But he is at his best when the part wants a man enjoying himself slightly more than the situation warrants: the Criminologist, Mycroft, anyone required to explain rather than threaten. If you want to see what he could do, choose one of those, and listen.
Biography
Charles Gray (born Donald Marshall Gray) was an English actor. Born in Bournemouth, he trained with the Royal Shakespeare Company and at the Old Vic after leaving a job as an estate agent's clerk. He changed his professional name in the mid-1950s to avoid confusion with another actor named Donald Gray.
Gray appeared as Dikko Henderson in the James Bond film You Only Live Twice (1967) and as Ernst Stavro Blofeld in Diamonds Are Forever (1971). He is also known for playing Mycroft Holmes in the Granada television series Sherlock Holmes (1984) and its sequels, and the Criminologist in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975). He worked extensively in film, television and on stage from the late 1950s until the 1990s.
