Robert Newton

The eyes go first. Whatever the film, Robert Newton's eyes roll up and sideways as though hunting for the exit, the vowels thicken into something from a Dorset harbour, and the volume climbs a notch above everyone else in the scene. He knew exactly what he was doing. "A character man can overact, ham it up, attract attention to himself without suffering too much criticism," he said, and he spent the rest of his career finding out how far that held.

He came up through Birmingham Repertory from 1921 and then the West End and Broadway before the cameras found him in 1932; Alexander Korda put him under contract in 1937. The war took him into the Royal Navy, with leave to make This Happy Breed (1944) for David Lean and Henry V (1944) for Laurence Olivier. In the Olivier he plays Ancient Pistol as a man who has been drunk since about 1409, and we laughed every time he lurched into the Technicolor and felt slightly sorry for him too, because Newton lets you see the fright under the bluster. The peak came after the war: Lukey the painter in Carol Reed's Odd Man Out (1947), Bill Sykes in Lean's Oliver Twist (1948), and then Long John Silver in Treasure Island (1950), the part that fixed for good how every pirate in every playground would sound.

What works is the conviction. The same tricks that read as ham in a costume romp turn to menace when the director puts a lid on him, and Lean got a Sykes out of him that critics still call chilling. What does not work is the absence of a lid. Left to himself, Newton played everything as Silver, and in the pirate parts the manner wore thin. He was cast again and again as the intense or dangerous one, in Hollywood and Australia as well as at home, and he rarely disappointed the casting. He also rarely surprised it.

His last role, released after his death in 1956, is Mr. Fix in Around the World in 80 Days, and it is a better goodbye than most actors get. Among a parade of famous faces doing one scene each, he does a whole performance: a red-faced detective chasing Fogg across the world on a hunch he cannot prove, always one boat behind and never once in doubt. The eyes still roll. This time they are funny on purpose.

Start with Treasure Island if you want the legend and Oliver Twist if you want the actor. Then find him in Henry V, at the edge of Olivier's frame, being drunker than the film strictly requires, and notice that nobody asked him to stop.