Clive Revill, the New Zealand native who after being recruited to be an actor by Laurence Olivier starred on Broadway, appeared in two films for Billy Wilder and provided the original voice of the evil Emperor Palpatine in The Empire Strikes Back, has died. He was 94.
Revill died March 11 at a care facility in Sherman Oaks after a battle with dementia, his daughter, Kate Revill, told Best In Business 2024.
The extremely versatile Revill played cops in Otto Preminger’s Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965), starring Olivier, and Jack Smight’s Kaleidoscope (1966), starring Warren Beatty; not one but two characters (a Scotsman and an Arab) in Joseph Losey’s Modesty Blaise (1966); and a physicist investigating strange goings-on at a haunted mansion in John Hough’s The Legend of Hell House (1973), starring Roddy McDowall.
A veteran of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Revill also appeared seven times on Broadway and received Tony nominations for his turns in two musicals: as the Bar-des-Inquiets proprietor Bob-Le-Hotu in 1961’s Irma la Douce and as Fagin in 1963’s Oliver!
For Wilder, he portrayed a man representing a Russian ballerina in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) — his character is led to believe that Holmes (Robert Stephens) and Dr. Watson (Colin Blakely) are gay — and the besieged hotel manager Carlo in Avanti! (1972), which earned him a Golden Globe nom.
For Star Wars: Episode V — The Empire Strikes Back (1980), director Irvin Kershner called upon Revill — the two had worked together on the 1966 film A Fine Madness — to record a couple of menacing lines in a Wilshire Boulevard studio in Los Angeles.
They would be used in the pivotal scene in which Darth Vader (James Earl Jones) communicates with the emperor (as a holographic projection).
Revill’s voice would be replaced on the 2004 DVD release of the film by Ian McDiarmid’s, who went on to play the character in Return of the Jedi (1983) and the franchise’s three prequels — but he had his fans nonetheless.
“They come up to me, and I tell them to get close and shut their eyes,” he said in a 2015 interview. “Then I say [in the emperor’s haunting voice], ‘There is a great disturbance in the Force.’ People turn white, and one nearly fainted!”
From left: Laurence Olivier, Clive Revill and Carol Lynley in 1965’s ‘Bunny Lake Is Missing.’
Courtesy Everett Collection
One of two sons, Clive Selsby Revill was born on April 18, 1930, in Wellington, New Zealand. His mother, Eleanor, was a homemaker and an opera singer, and his father, Malet, was a carpenter.
A great fan of Shakespeare, Revill was working as an actuary in a bank when he met Olivier and his wife, actress Vivien Leigh, who were on a tour of New Zealand. Olivier told him to come to his Old Vic Theatre School in Bristol to study acting, and Revill raised the money to make the trip to England in 1950.
He struggled away from home. “I had my doubts at one point when I thought, ‘I can’t do it. I can’t do this. I can’t find it within myself,’” Revill recalled in a 2017 interview. “I had a marvelous talk with a woman who was in charge of movement in school and she took me aside and said, ‘You’ve got to go back to within yourself and find the truth within yourself, and if you can find that truth, never, never, never lose it because it’s more than a ring on a finger. It’s the absolute, innermost line within your life and your spirit.’”
Revill regained his confidence and in 1952 made his Broadway debut in Mr. Pickwick, based on Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers. He then joined the RSC and in 1964 starred in a bathtub as Jean-Paul Marat alongside Patrick Magee as the Marquis de Sade in a production of Marat/Sade.
Revill returned to Broadway in 1967 to star as Sheridan Whiteside in the musical Sherry!, in 1971 to star as Max Beerbohm in The Incomparable Max, in 1975 to play Professor Moriarty in Sherlock Holmes and in 1981 to star as Clare Quilty in Edward Albee’s adaptation of Lolita.
Clive Revill with Gayle Hunnicutt in 1973’s ‘The Legend of Hell House.’
20th Century Fox Film Corp./Courtesy Everett Collection
He could play all manner of ethnicities, and his big-screen body of work included The Double Man (1967), Fathom (1967), The Assassination Bureau (1969), A Severed Head (1970), The Black Windmill (1974), One of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing (1975), Zorro: The Gay Blade (1981), Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993), Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995) and The Queen of Spain (2016).
Revill portrayed an Irishman in 1978 on Peter Falk’s last episode of the original Columbo series and showed up on everything from Maude, Hart to Hart, Dynasty, Remington Steele, Murder, She Wrote and Babylon 5 to Magnum, P.I., Newhart, MacGyver, Dear John, The Fall Guy and Star Trek: The Next Generation.
In addition to Emperor Palpatine, he played other Star Wars characters in video games and was Alfred the butler on Batman: The Animated Series in 1992.
Survivors also include his granddaughter, Kayla.
Alison Edmond contributed to this report.
