Now, Donald Pleasence, I know. I’ve even seen his horror great, Halloween, which I thought was a fine movie, albeit not my type and very obviously not filmed in the Midwest. (It was in fact filmed only a few miles from where I grew up!) He is appropriately chilling in it even though he’s the authority figure and not the villain. Indeed, he had a presence in all of his movies, at least the ten or so that I’ve seen. It carries through even in the two movies of his that I’ve only seen with puppets in the corner. Well—he did 137 movies, plus a ton of TV; there are bound to be a few stinkers in there.
In 1939, Pleasence actually declared himself a conscientious objector. After the Luftwaffe raids on London during the Battle of Britain, he enlisted after all, joining the RAF as an aircraft wireless operator. He flew almost sixty raids over Europe before being shot down in 1944 and sent to Stalag Luft I. Not only was he not the only actor there—fellow inmate Buster Slaven had been in movies before the war and would go back to acting after it—some of the prisoners were also involved in the real Great Escape. One would also be a Watergate burglar; actually, the list of Stalag Luft I prisoners is fascinating.
After the war, he went back to acting, and my goodness but he did a lot of acting. He never stopped. At least two of his movies were released after his death. I can’t find a release date on a third, Safe Haven, but it was released the year he died, and he died in February 1995, so probably? There’s a wide range of quality between Halloween and Pumaman, between The Great Escape and Warrior of the Lost World. But I don’t think he ever gave less than his best. If he was acting in Pumaman, one assumes he’d put the same effort into everything else.
While he was an OBE, he never really got a lot of notice for his work. The highest accolade IMDb lists is an Emmy nomination. (The Defection of Simas Kurdika, 1978.) He got four Tony nominations over the years but never won. I suppose he’d just have to settle for cultural influence. After all, it’s not everyone whose performance is as iconic as that of Pleasence as Blofeld. Without Donald Pleasence, would Blofeld have been half as culturally significant?
And, yes, he was Lucas Deranian in Escape to Witch Mountain. It’s not his best movie; to my mind, from what I’ve seen, that would be The Great Escape, though there’s plenty of room for disagreement with as many credits as he has. But when you’ve seen Escape to Witch Mountain as many times as I have, well. And even in that role, he gives the right balance of charm and menace. You can see why an adult might believe his claims even as we know they are utterly bogus, and when he goes after the kids, we believe it. It’s also definitely a sign that the people at Disney did outstanding casting work in the ’70s.
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