Marius Goring’s refinement suits eccentric and suspect characters. We value his work with Powell and Pressburger, though The Red Shoes exposes a limitation: his earnest lover struggles to hold our attention beside the dancing.
Fi1m perspective
Marius Goring’s Julian Craster has to put feelings into words while the dancing in The Red Shoes (1948) has already made them plain. As the composer in love with the ballerina, he keeps the personal stakes clear, even when the dialogue asks him to sound grander than conversation allows. We grew impatient during the romantic scenes because the declarations kept us waiting for Shearer to move again. That is a reservation about one part of a film we recommend without hesitation.
His screen career began in the mid-1930s, and the recurring casting as urbane Europeans could accommodate both charm and threat. His first collaboration with Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger was The Spy in Black (1939), playing U-boat officer Lieutenant Felix Schuster. By A Matter of Life and Death (1946), he was playing the heavenly Conductor 71, a more eccentric use of that refinement. Those two parts help explain why Powell and Pressburger matter so much to an assessment of him: they did not keep asking him to repeat himself.
Elsewhere, repeated casting as German officers and villains gave him fewer opportunities to vary the work. In The Red Shoes, the restriction comes from the writing: the romance must keep explaining Victoria’s choice. Lermontov holds our attention more firmly, but Julian remains understandable, and we never lose sight of his personal stake. We would blame some of the stiffness on Powell and Pressburger’s fondness for declarations about art, rather than assume Goring has brought it all with him.
Television gave him a sustained lead in The Expert (1968–1976), playing forensic pathologist Professor John Hardy. He deserves to be considered as a television leading actor as well as a film supporting player, rather than having that work treated as a footnote to his four Powell and Pressburger collaborations. Begin with those films, but do not expect The Red Shoes to leave its composer uppermost in the mind.
Biography
Marius Goring was an English stage and screen actor. Born on 23 May 1912 in Newport on the Isle of Wight, he was educated at the Perse School in Cambridge and at universities in Frankfurt, Munich, Vienna and Paris. He trained for the stage at the Old Vic dramatic school under Harcourt Williams and made his first London stage appearance in 1927.
Goring appeared regularly at the Old Vic and Sadler's Wells in the 1930s and performed Shakespearean roles including at Stratford. During the Second World War he served in the British Army and worked as supervisor of productions for the BBC's German Service, broadcasting propaganda. He is best known for his four films with Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, including The Spy in Black (1939), A Matter of Life and Death (1946) and The Red Shoes (1948), in which he played Julian Craster.
Other notable film roles include appearances in The Barefoot Contessa (1954) and Exodus (1960). On television he starred in the BBC series The Expert (1968–1976) and played Theodore Maxtible in the Doctor Who serial The Evil of the Daleks (1967). He was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1979 and received the CBE in 1991. Goring died on 30 September 1998 in East Sussex.
