Michael Byrne, the British character actor and stage veteran who played a Nazi in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and the wizard Gellert Grindelwald in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1, died June 20, The Guardian reported. He was 82.
The blue-eyed Byrne also was memorable as a soldier to attempts to rape the wife of Mel Gibson’s William Wallace in Braveheart (1995) and as a concentration camp survivor who helps bring down Ian McKellen’s Nazi war criminal in Bryan Singer’s Apt Pupil (1998).
His film résumé included Mike Newell’s The Good Father (1985), Roger Spottiswoode’s Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), Philip Noyce’s The Saint (1997), Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York (2002), Phil Alden Robinson’s The Sum of All Fears (2002) and Dustin Hoffman’s Quartet (2012).
Byrne portrayed the ruthless Colonel Vogel in Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), and he was the elderly Grindelwald, the dark wizard who had been defeated in a duel with Michael Gambon’s Dumbledore, in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 (2010).
Born in Hampstead in north London on Nov. 7, 1943, Byrne appeared alongside the likes of Laurence Olivier, Maggie Smith and Robert Stephens in National Theatre Company productions in the 1960s.
In 1971, he starred with Alan Bates in the West End in Butley, directed by Harold Pinter, and the trio reunited for the 1974 film version.
The 1970s also saw him in several war films, among them John Sturges’ The Eagle Has Landed (1976), Richard Attenborough’s A Bridge Too Far (1977) and Guy Hamilton’s Force 10 From Navarone (1978).
His more recent stage roles included a turn in 2010 as Romeo opposite Sian Phillips as Juliet at the Bristol Old Vic. And for television, he starred from 2008-10 as Ted Page, the long-lost ex-lover of Sue Nicholls’ Audrey Roberts and dad of Helen Worth’s Gail Platt, on the ITV soap opera Coronation Street.
Survivors include his wife, actress Carole Nimmons, whom he married in 1965; their daughters, Tara and Bryony, and their grandchildren, Tom, Chloe and Jasmine.
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