Farewell, Peter The Great

He was that virtually extinct thing, the quiet revolutionary genius with class oozing out of every pore. Everything he did had that edge that risk about it, that today's stand up comedians would kill to possess.

When I first met Peter Ustinov, he was an old man.... still funny, still able to dominate the dinner table with the well placed one liner, or a story about his wartime experiences as Batman to David Niven. But by that time, of course, he was the revered ... well, everything... because he never seemed to have any difficulty in doing whatever he wanted to do... write plays and books. Compose music, act, moderate TV shows.

And talk. My God, the man could talk. The chin would rest on the hand for a moment, the eyes would twinkle and wham, out popped the joke or the memory. But always generous, no one, young or old, at that table would feel that this was just an elderly guy talking a bit too much.

And if you'd heard quite a few of the stories before, he was a great one for putting a new spin on an old yarn and turning it into something fresh and new. If any of the obituaries in your newspapers mention that he was British, despite the knighthood, don't believe them. He was part Russian, part German and with a smattering of Palestinian. He was educated here, he observed the British and understood us, but then as he told me over dinner that delightful evening, the key to Peter Ustinov was his deep rooted belief that the human race wasn't that bad and that injustice could be resolved peacefully. That's why he was an ambassador for the United Nations Childrens Fund way before Rock Stars found such things a great route to free publicity.

With his death goes the actor, but there are still the movies to replay: "Spartacus," "Quo Vadis" and a clutch of British movies he wrote, like "Private Angelo" and "Romanoff and Juliet." And there was the time when he played Mad King George in a CBS News special, talking to a tree in German, convincingly. But with his passing goes a generation of optimists, who could laugh at the world and then set about trying to make it better

By Simon Bates