Michael Gough: He seems to be two people. Michael Gough's Dr Jekyll is the beautifully- spoken, subtle, classical actor whose King Lear is well-remembered, who won a Tony Award in 1976 for his performance in the Broadway hit, Bedroom Farce, who played Bertrand Russell in the film Wittgenstein (1993), who starred in Dennis Potter's Blackeyes for BBC television in 1990.
Then there is his Mr Hyde - the hammy, ranting, scenery-chewing, eye-bulging star of more than a dozen lurid schlockfests, including Dr Terror's House of Horrors (1965), Horror Hospital (1976), Berserk (1967) and cult favourite Horrors of the Black Museum (1959), in which he played an insane criminologist who commits a series of gory murders in order to write books about them.
Somewhere between the two is yet another Michael Gough, familiar to a new generation of movie-goers as Alfred the faithful butler in the Batman series that started well in the hands of director Tim Burton, but swiftly deteriorated.
Gough, who has been described as "a melancholy man resigned to working in horror films," was born to British parents in Malaya in 1917 and trained at the Old Vic school with Laurence Olivier, Edith Evans and Vivien Leigh. He made his first theatrical appearance in 1936 and his first film, Blanche Fury, in 1948. After roles in 1950s classics such as The Man in the White Suit, Richard III and Reach for the Sky, he made his horror film début, Dracula, for Hammer in 1958.
After that, they came thick and fast: Konga (1961), Black Zoo (1963), They Came From Beyond Space (1967), Crucible of Horror (1969), and many more.
Michael Gough is much-loved by cool, youngish film-makers. Burton cast him as Alfred in the first Batman movie because he worshipped him as a kid, and TV's bizarre League of Gentlemen team have named him as a collective icon. No doubt to Gough's private chagrin, it is for the drivel that he is remembered with such affection - but all the same, it must be gratifying to still be in such demand at the age of 85.
He has never been too snooty to give his everything - and then some - to projects that are well beneath his proven expertise, and he is now, alongside sometime colleague Christopher Lee (80), the last of the Grand Old British Gentlemen of horror films, a tradition that began in the 1930s with the daddy of them all, Boris Karloff.
Stephen Dixon