Clive Revill, the actor best known for providing the voice of Emperor Palpatine in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, has died. He was 94.
The New Zealand-born star was a veteran of the Royal Shakespeare Company and made two popular films with Billy Wilder in the 1970s:The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes and Avanti!.
As a voice actor, he was known for playing Alfred Pennyworth in Batman: The Animated Series.
His daughter, Kate Revill told The Hollywood Reporter her father died on March 11 at a care facility in Sherman Oaks after a battle with dementia.
Revill was born on 18 April 1930 in Wellington, New Zealand. He originally trained to be an accountant, but while working as an actuary in a bank he happened to meet Laurence Olivier and his wife Vivien Leigh, who were on a tour of the country. After Revill expressed his love of Shakespeare, Olivier encouraged him to come and study at his Old Vic Theatre School in Bristol.
In 1950, at the age of 20, Revill made the journey to England and made his stage debut in Twelfth Night. He subsequently moved to Stratford-upon-Avon and spent much of the 1950s appearing in Shakespeare productions including Hamlet, Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar and The Tempest.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s Revill played a string of eccentrics in British films such as Kaleidoscope (1966), Modesty Blaise (1966) and A Severed Head (1970). In 1965, he appeared onscreen opposite his mentor Olivier in Otto Preminger’s Bunny Lake Is Missing.
Two of his most high-profile screen roles came from his work with Billy Wilder. In 1970’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes he plays a man working for a Russian ballerina who wants to have Holmes’ child, who winds up believing that Holmes and Watson are in a relationship. In 1972’s Avanti! he played the put-upon hotel manager Carlo and was rewarded with a Golden Globe nomination.
After moving to the United States, Revill made a series of guest appearances in hit TV shows of the era including Columbo, Magnum PI and Murder, She Wrote.
For 1980’s Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, director Irvin Kershner recruited Revill to voice the villainous Emperor Palpatine, who is only seen as a holographic projection speaking to Darth Vader.
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Kershner had worked with Revill before, on 1966’s A Fine Madness, and felt he could embue the Emperor’s few lines of dialogue with the requisite menace. In later versions of the film, starting with the 2004 DVD release, Revill’s lines were replaced by the voice of Ian McDiarmid who was cast as the Emperor in 1983’s Return of the Jedi .
That didn’t stop Star Wars fans from continuing to associate Revill with the role he originated. “They come up to me, and I tell them to get close and shut their eyes,” he said in 2015. “Then I say, ‘There is a great disturbance in the Force.’ People turn white, and one nearly fainted!”
Revill is survived by his daughter Kate and granddaughter Kayla.