TV: HOLOCAUST - US MINI SERIES (1978)

Given TP's commanding presence and sometimes menacing air, audiences could be forgiven for believing he'd spent much of his career in jackboots,  shrieking 'Heil Hitler', or the like.


Actually, he donned the Nazi uniform just twice.  In 1984 as Reichsfuhrer Himmler berating Christopher Plummer in the TV movie, The Scarlet & The Black and in 1978 when he played Colonel Blobel, an SS commander given the task of executing thousands of jews in the major mini-TV series, Holocaust.


Of this later role, critic Michael Coveney in his Guardian obituary would remark, 'It was as to hard to watch as it was to credit that this was the same actor who was so delightful as Harold Skimpole in Charles Dicken's Bleak House (1985)'.


Well, while actors sometimes welcome the opportunity to play the villain, TP's significant challenge in accepting this part was to convey all the villainy of the character but without  melodrama or charicature. 


Colonel Dorf of the SS was as ruthless a figure of the Thrid Reich as it was possible to conceive. Utterly inhuman in his despatch of innocent lives, blindly bent on amassing a fortune from the spoils of war and seldom without a drink in his hand, here was a terrifying figure.


However, in keeping with the intention of the producers and the excellent script by Gerald Green, the keynote of this drama was going to be realism.


'Tell it like it is' could have been the tag line for this television epic.  Present the bad guys as real people and the tragedy of the Holocaust would be all the more poignant.  Crimes of man unto man, neighbour upon neighbour and a genocide occurring in our all too recent history

TP was one of the contingent of British actors who had been cast to take the roles of the Nazi command including David Warner, Nigel Hawthorne, Tom Bell, Edward Hardwicke and Ian Holm.  Their first task when arriving in Vienna where the majority of shooting would take place was to attend costume fittings.

Their measurements had been sent ahead to an established tailoring firm in the city and when they initially tried on their uniforms they were highly impressed by the quality of the cut and how well they fitted.  They later learned that the company were no strangers to such commissions as they had made uniforms for the Nazis for real during the annexation of Austria.