Plain Talk

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By Mursi Saad El-Din

Whenever I feel under the weather, I pick Peter Ustinov's hilarious autobiography Dear Me. I must have been through it a dozen times, but when I picked it up last week it was with a feeling of foreboding. On 28 March Peter Ustinov died at the age of 82.

Since learning this from the Herald Tribune, obituaries have been published in a number of newspapers, and tributes were paid by leaders from the worlds of show business, academia and the United Nations. This is not surprising: he had a rich cinema and stage life; in 1968 he was elected rector of Dundee University; in 1988 he was elected to the Academie Française -- this in addition to being chancellor of Durham University and UNICEF ambassador.

I had the pleasure of seeing two plays about the Cold War written by Peter Ustinov: The Love of the Four Colonels and Romanoff and Juliet. The four colonels -- British, American, French and Russian -- were, as he writes in his autobiography, "disgruntled men with longings and aspirations beyond their grasps, beyond their means". Romanoff and Juliet was a variation on the tragic Romeo and Juliet love theme, with Romeo the son of the Soviet ambassador; Juliet, the daughter of the American ambassador; and Verona, "a small neutral country, cringing in the centre of the political arena, its economy largely dependent on printing stamps with deliberate anomalies". As he explains in Dear Me, the intractable families, the Capulets and the Montagues, were replaced by the governments of the USA and the USSR.

Part of Ustinov's autobiography is in the form of a dialogue between himself and "dear me". Like his other writings (novels, plays, short stories, poems and essays), the autobiography is both witty and full of wisdom. As critic John Lahr wrote, it is "an unusually graceful memoir whose wit bears witness to Ustinov's generosity and seriousness".

I had the pleasure of meeting Peter Ustinov in 1977 or 1978, when they were shooting the film of Agatha Christie's masterpiece Death on the Nile. He was playing Hercule Poirot, the eccentric Belgian detective. I was at that time head of the State Information Service, and the press centre was responsible -- as it still is -- for issuing permits and giving facilities to foreign correspondents and film workers. I was visited by the film company's representative asking me where he could find an old ship ( dahabia ) similar to the one described in Agatha Christie's book. Somehow we managed to find one and I held a reception for the film crew. That was when I had a chat with Ustinov, mainly about his role in Waltarils' film The Egyptian.

In Dear Me Ustinov compares his role in Quo va dis and The Egyptian. "In a sense," he writes, "Rome is already part of the modern world, whereas the spirit of Ancient Egypt is still wrapped in the secrecy of sphinxes and the smiles of cats which make the enigma of Mona Lisa seem commonplace."

Ustinov's humour is apparent in his description of the film director Michael Curtiz: "a tall and upright Hungarian who had come to Hollywood so long ago that he gazed over the palm trees and stucco castellations of its civilisation with the eye of a blind, all- seeing prophet of its faith. He had never learned American, let alone English, and he had forgotten his Hungarian which left him in a limbo of his own, both entertaining and wild."

Ustinov goes on to describe how he was introduced to Curtiz: "he greeted me with the complicated grace of an Imperial corps-commander welcoming a new lieutenant hot from Budapest. The next day I was presented to him again, with precisely the same result. He had evidently forgotten me in the interim. I reckoned I was introduced to him at least ten times during the first week [we had met], each time for the first time."

Though hardly the first I read Ustinov's memoires, I laughed so much going through the book. Such is his wit and his ability to make his reader or viewer share his sense of humour.