He also played as Bob Cratchit in my (second) favorite A Christmas Carol film starring George C. Scott.
Warner was on David Morrissey's podcast,
Who Am I This Time?, one of those podcasts with an actor talking about their craft, last year. (Morrissey is very good at eliciting conversation in this, and I think it's one of the better examples in the genre.) While the interview is mainly about
The Omen, Warner also talks about some of his other work, including
A Christmas Carol.
He was originally cast as Jacob Marley, but Warner didn't want to do another sinister character at that time and he had his agent push for Bob Cratchet. During the shoot, Warner mainly hung out with George C. Scott in his trailer, and they played
Trivial Pursuit. Scott insisted the answers to questions about
Patton were incorrect!
Warner's entire career is worth gushing about (he's still the Ra's al Ghul to me) but there's something deeply special to me about him acting against Shatner and Stewart in two opposite roles and pulling off both effortlessly. His film stuff is worth checking out first and I have second the talk about checking out his Big Finish audio work.
I was listening to some of his BBC audio work this evening -- specifically, BBC Radio 4's 2014
The Once and Future King, in which he plays Merlyn -- but I think 2011's
The History of Titus Groan, adapting Mervyn Peake's
Gormenghast novels, may boast one of Warner's finest performances. He plays a character called The Artist, a painter nearing the end of his own life who lives on an island, and Titus Groan tells him the story of his childhood, his escape from his family and Gormenghast, and the world he finds beyond Gormenghast's walls. It offered me the key to
Gormenghast that had always eluded me, and Warner's character helped me to understand some things I went through in my own life.
