\n<\/p>\n
Joss Ackland, a self-described workaholic actor who appeared in more than 130 movies, TV shows and radio programs, most notably \u2014 for American audiences, at least \u2014 as a villainous South African diplomat in \u201cLethal Weapon 2,\u201d died on Sunday at his home in Clovelly, a village in southwestern England. He was 95.<\/p>\n
His agent, Paul Pearson, confirmed the death.<\/p>\n
He was a renowned character actor onscreen, having held memorable supporting roles in movies like the Cold War thriller \u201cThe Hunt for Red October\u201d (1990) and the hockey comedy \u201cThe Mighty Ducks\u201d (1992). He also earned a British Academy Film Awards nomination for \u201cWhite Mischief\u201d (1987), a drama set in colonial Kenya. But Mr. Ackland\u2019s true home was the London stage.<\/p>\n
He was among the actors who provided the firm foundation of English theater during the postwar years, ranking alongside Ian Holm<\/a>, Maggie Smith and Claire Bloom. Many in that generation, like Mr. Ackland, later found success in Hollywood.<\/p>\n A bear of a man with a gravelly voice and a gregarious, opinionated presence onstage and off, Mr. Ackland was prolific and versatile. He played Falstaff, Shakespeare\u2019s great comic character in \u201cHenry IV, Part 1\u201d and Henry IV, Part 2\u201d; the writer C.S. Lewis in the British TV version of \u201cShadowlands\u201d; and Juan Per\u00f3n in the original London cast of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Weber\u2019s \u201cEvita\u201d (1978), opposite Elaine Paige in the title role.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI don\u2019t think I\u2019ve made any role my own,\u201d he told The Evening Standard in 2006. \u201cMy quality is variation. I\u2019m a hit- and-run actor. I get to do a lot of villains, but that\u2019s because I\u2019m English.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Mr. Ackland could be self-disparaging about his willingness to take work wherever it became available, a predilection driven less by money than a need to be constantly on the move.<\/p>\n He came to regret many of his nontheatrical roles, like those in the comedy \u201cBill and Ted\u2019s Bogus Journey\u201d (1991) and a meaty cameo in the video for the song \u201cAlways on My Mind<\/a>\u201d by the English pop band the Pet Shop Boys.<\/p>\n \u201cI do an awful lot of crap, but if it\u2019s not immoral, I don\u2019t mind,\u201d he told The Guardian in 2001<\/a>. \u201cI\u2019m a workaholic. Sometimes it\u2019s a form of masochism.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n He was even ambivalent about his role in \u201cLethal Weapon 2\u201d (1989) as Arjen Rudd, the oily, racist South African who battles two Los Angeles police detectives, Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) and Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover).<\/p>\n Rudd, a consul-general dealing drugs on the side, gets away with murder by claiming diplomatic immunity, even at the point where he appears to kill Riggs \u2014 just before Murtaugh shoots him in the head.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s just been revoked,\u201d Murtaugh says, a punchline that became a catchphrase of the late 1980s, much to Mr. Ackland\u2019s chagrin.<\/p>\n \u201cNot a day goes by without someone across the street going \u2018diplomatic immunity,\u2019\u201d he said in a BBC interview in 2013. \u201cIt drives you up the wall.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Sidney Edmond Jocelyn Ackland was born on Feb. 29, 1928 \u2014 a leap day \u2014 in the North Kensington neighborhood of London. His father, Sydney Ackland, was a journalist from Ireland whose serial philandering kept him largely out of his son\u2019s life, leaving him to be raised by his mother, Ruth Izod, a maid.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n He gravitated to acting as a child, inspired, he later said, by the mysterious smoke and fog of Depression-era London.<\/p>\n \u201cTo be in the fog was to be in an adventure where the imagination could stretch itself, allowing me to be anywhere in the world,\u201d he told The Independent in 1997. \u201cHouses and streets would disappear, and a lamppost would faintly emerge from the gloom and become a pirate ship.\u201d<\/p>\n He attended the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London, paying his way by cleaning barracks for U.S. Army troops stationed there during World War II. He graduated in 1945, the same year he started acting professionally.<\/p>\n Mr. Ackland spent decades performing in repertory and small-town theater. In 1951, he traveled to Pitlochry, a small town in the Scottish Highlands, to appear in J.M. Barrie\u2019s play \u201cMary Rose.\u201d Among his fellow actors was Rosemary Kirkcaldy.<\/p>\n Though she was engaged at the time, the two fell in love and married later that year.<\/p>\n With a growing family \u2014 the couple eventually had seven children \u2014 Mr. Ackland despaired of making a career in acting. In 1955, he and his wife, with two infants in tow, moved to East Africa, where he spent six months running a tea plantation in Malawi.<\/p>\n But the stage beckoned, and they spent two years in South Africa picking up acting work. The country\u2019s intrusive apartheid regime disgusted them; at one point the police raided their home looking for subversive material and left with a copy of the novel \u201cBlack Beauty,\u201d the tale of a horse by Anna Sewell, which investigators thought might be anti-apartheid.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n After returning to Britain, the couple restarted their careers, even as their family was growing rapidly.<\/p>\n One evening in 1963, when Mr. Ackland was performing as the lead in Bertolt Brecht\u2019s \u201cLife of Galileo,\u201d a fire broke out in their London home. Ms. Kirkcaldy, pregnant with their sixth child, managed to get the other five out of the house but broke her back when she leaped from an upper floor.<\/p>\n Doctors said she would miscarry and never walk again; instead, she delivered a healthy child and was on her feet again within 18 months.<\/p>\n