Profile of Marius Goring on Famous Like Me

Marius Goring (May 23, 1912 - September 30, 1998) was a British stage and cinema actor. He is most often remembered for the four films he did with Powell & Pressburger, particularly as Conductor 71 in A Matter of Life and Death. He frequently played French and German roles.

Goring was born in Newport, Isle of Wight, the son of Doctor Charles Goring and Kate Macdonald. After attending Perse School in Cambridge, he went on to study at several European universities. He first appeared on stage in 1925, in Cambridge, and by 1927 had performed in London. His early stage career included appearances at the Old Vic, Sadler's Wells, Stratford and several European tours. He first played the West End in a 1934 production of the Voysey Inheritance at the Shaftesbury Theatre. During the 1930s he played a variety of Shakespearean roles, including Feste in Twelfth Night (1937), Macbeth and Romeo, as well as Trip in School for Scandal. In 1929, he became a founding member of British Equity, the actor's union, and became its president from 1963-65, and again from 1975-82.

During the war he joined the army, becoming supervisor of BBC radio productions broadcasting to Germany, and continued acting. He often worked under the name Charles Richardson, because of the association of his name with Hermann Göring. In 1941, he married his second wife, the actress Lucie Mannheim. She died in 1976, and the next year Goring married television producer Prudence Fitzgerald, who survived him.

He died from cancer in 1998 aged 86.

His TV work included starring as Sir Percy Blakeney in The Scarlet Pimpernel (ITV, 1955) – a series which he also co-wrote/produced – Theodore Maxtible in the Doctor Who story The Evil of the Daleks (BBC, 1966); George V in Edward and Mrs Simpson (Thames, 1980); and The Old Men at the Zoo (BBC, 1983).

He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1979 and awarded a CBE in 1991.

Selected films

• Mr Perrin and Mr Traill (1948).
• Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1950): playing a musician obsessed with Ava Gardner
• Circle of Danger (1950).
• So Little Time (1952): as a sympathetic German officer.
• The Barefoot Contessa (1954): as the playboy in love with Ava Gardner (again).
• I Was Monty's Double (1958).
• Girl on a Motorcycle (1968): the father of Marianne Faithfull's biker heroine.

With Powell & Pressburger:

• The Spy in Black (1939).
• A Matter of Life and Death (1946): Conductor 71, sent to take pilot David Niven to heaven.
• The Red Shoes (1948): a composer who falls in love with the star ballerina. Goring contributed to some of the film's dialogue, although he is not credited for it.
• Ill Met by Moonlight (1957): a Nazi general kipnapped by Dirk Bogarde's Crete partisans.

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