“I would like, if I may, to take you…on a strange journey.” These are the first words spoken in The Rocky Horror Picture Show by the film’s erudite narrator/host. For many moviegoers, it’s also the first time they may recall seeing British actor Charles Gray. His expositional turn in the beloved 1975 horror/comedy, however, came at roughly the midway point of a more than 40-year stage, screen, and TV career. Said career took him to both sides of the Atlantic and saw him play James Bond’s arch-nemesis, Sherlock Holmes’ older brother, and Princess Di’s father, among other roles.
Born Donald Marshall Gray in 1928, he grew up in the southern English resort town of Bournemouth. During World War II Donald was schoolmates there with future funnyman Benny Hill. Interested in film and film stars from an early age, he left an office job in the early 1950s and got his first professional acting job as Charles the Wrestler in a Regent’s Park production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It (Yes, Shakespeare had a wrestler as a character!). Since there was already an English actor called Donald Gray, he borrowed a grandfather’s name and became Charles Gray.
In the late ’50s Charles worked steadily on the stage (including the famed Old Vic company) and on British TV (The Invisible Man and Danger Man, among other shows). His film debut came in 1958’s I Accuse!, a retelling of the turn-of-the-century Dreyfuss Affair. Gray would divide his time between Britain and the U.S., appearing in various West End plays and turning up on Brodway in the 1961 drama Kean. Moviegoers would see him in small roles alongside Laurence Olivier in The Entertainer (1960) and Cliff Robertson in Masquerade (1965), and they heard his voice in an uncredited turn in 1962’s Best Picture winner, Lawrence of Arabia.
Gray earned cinematic success in 1967 with a pair of very different roles; as a WWII German officer suspected of killing a Nazi agent in occupied Warsaw in The Night of the Generals, and as “Dikko” Henderson, a wooden-legged British agent living in Japan who gives James Bond (Sean Connery) vital information in You Only Live Twice. The following year he again played a WWII general–British, this time–who is among the POWs in a lavish Italian-run facility inflitrated by an American soldier (Paul Newman) in The Secret War of Harry Frigg. 1970 found Charles as the leader of a Satanic cult in the Hammer chiller The Devil Rides Out and as the Earl of Essex in the historical drama Cromwell.
With his performance as SPECTRE kingpin Ernst Stavros Blofeld in 1971’s Bond actioner Diamonds Are Forever, Gray joined an elite list of actors who played different roles in multiple 007 films. His version of the archvillain is more urbane and, frankly, more upper-class English than either Donald Pleasance in You Only Live Twice or Telly Savalas in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. When asked once whether his “posh” mannerisms carried over behind the camera, Gray replied “I’m not in the least aristocratic in real life, old boy. I much prefer a pint at the local.”
That stylized way of delivering lines served Charles well when, in 1975, he landed the Rocky Horror Picture Show role that millions of midnight moviegoers would know him for. Referred to in the credits only as “The Criminologist…an Expert,” Gray drolly comments on the bizarre goings-on in Dr. Frank-N-Furter’s remote castle. He also offers a helpful “how-to” (complete with dance chart) for anyone unsure of how to do the Time Warp, and of course has the film’s final lines of dialogue. Insisting for years that he never saw the movie for which he’d be best known, Gray once commented, “I never expected to be the object of a cult.” And despite what fans have been yelling for decades, he does indeed have a neck.
1976’s The Seven-Per-Cent Solution would boast Gray in a small but key part as Mycroft Holmes, clandestine government official and older brother to Nicol Williamson’s cocaine-addicted Sherlock Holmes, a part he would return to the next decade. You can hear his (unbilled) voice in a third Bond entry, 1977’s The Spy Who Loved Me, and in 1978 he also appeared in the financial thriller Silver Bears and the horror tale The Legacy. Key 1980s roles included a sinister butler in the Agatha Christie whodunit The Mirror Crack’d (1980); as Judge Oliver Wright in Richard O’Brien’s offbeat Rocky Horror follow-up Shock Treatment (1981); and as John Spencer, 8th Earl Spencer, in the U.S. made-for-TV drama Charles & Diana: A Royal Love Story (1982). He also reprised his role as Mycroft in four episodes of Granada TV’s Sherlock Holmes series, featuring Jeremy Brett as the Great Detective.
Working steadily on the stage and TV in the 1990s until health issues began to take their toll, Gray passed away in a London hospital from throat cancer in March of 2000. He was 71 years old.