Julian Glover as Richard the Lionheart in The Crusade (1965).
As Captain Tancredi – aka Scaroth, last of the Jagaroth – in City of Death (1979).
“W
hen I first started in classical theatre, I used
to
play nice, jolly people,” into series such as
The
Avengers
and
Doctor
Who.
I got
Julian Glover recalled in 2004. “But… then I went
such a reputation for playing villains that I used to say to casting directors, ‘Don’t cast me because everyone will know that I did it.’”
In invoking Doctor Who, Glover was clearly thinking of a classic story recorded in the spring of 1979. In City of Death, he was cast in multiple roles yet played the same character. Count Scarlioni, a monied art collector in 20th-century Paris, was coupled with Captain Tancredi, a hard-faced Renaissance man in 16th-century Florence, and both of them turned out to be time-scattered fragments of Scaroth, last of the Jagaroth. This Janus-faced assignment, in which Scaroth’s plan to put himself back together will erase the whole of human history, was enriched by a Glover speciality – the velvet suavity concealing sadistic, ice-cold resolve.