By Mursi Saad El-Din British actor and humourist Peter Ustinov turned 80 last year, an occasion that was celebrated in Russia, his parents' homeland, as well as in Germany, France and Italy. Such is his international fame that cultural institutions everywhere rushed to honour his achievements. I remember watching Ustinov in London in the early 1950s playing the Russian colonel in The Love of Four Colonels , a playoff which -- if I am not mistaken -- he was the author. The play is set in Berlin in the aftermath of World War II. Four colonels -- French, British, American and Russian -- are sitting around a table discussing issues pertaining to the city occupied by the four allies. When discussions veer towards difficult problems, three colonels, the French, British and American, leave the table one after another to telephone their respective governments regarding the issue. Ustinov, playing the Russian, gets up and the three other military men gaze at him and together ask what he was after. Coldly he looked at their anxious faces and calmly said: "Gentlemen, there is such a thing as the call of nature. This is where I'm going." The audience rolled with laughter. Such was Peter Ustinov's humour. I remember reading his autobiography Dear Me and finding in it a way of achieving a catharsis through laughter. It is -- in the words of Simon Callow, reviewing a newly published biography of Ustinov, "one of the most deliriously funny and provocative theatrical autobiographies in the canon." A new book Peter Ustinov: The Gift of Laughter by John Miller has just been published in London and widely reviewed in the press. I can't wait to lay my hands on it, since I am one of Ustinov's great admirers. I had the pleasure of meeting him when he was playing the role of Hercule Poirot in Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile. He had a fund of funny stories to tell, and such a way of telling them; with a straight face and a twitching mouth that reflected a mixture of jollity and naughtiness, giving the impression of complete nonchalance. Peter Ustinov is not just a great actor, he has also written 21 plays, some of which he directed and in many of which he starred, not merely in the West End, but also in Paris, Berlin and Rome. He is also a novelist, short story writer, historian and political commentator. He has directed a number of operas. In addition, according to Callow, he has been a "roving and highly effective ambassador for international organisations and a fiery proactive rector of both Dundee and Durham universities, who has toured the world making hard-hitting documentaries, and who has done all this on a bubble of irrepressible and epidemically contagious mirth." But it is the ability to make others laugh that is Ustinov's most precious gift, as the title of this recent biography so succinctly reminds us. In everything that Ustinov has written, there is always a grain of humour, the germ of mirth. His genius lies in his comedy and in his ability to invoke laughter, not only through words but through facial expressions -- even those seemingly involuntary twitches. He is, again as Callow puts it, "funny enough on the page, on the air, and on the screen, but in the flesh he is discombobulatingly funny, as only the great comedians are: he engenders an air of sureal fantasy which turns the world into a madhouse peopled by meticulously observed loons, megalomaniacs and doubters." I remember watching Ustinov play Nero in Quo Vadis. He had an ability to invoke laughter in the face the murderous nature of the character he was playing. Nero was, after all, the ultimate megalomaniac, content to play his fiddle as Rome burned as a backdrop to his notes. Miller, the author of this recent biography, describes his interviews with Ustinov in preparation of the book. "I was betrothed to laughter," Ustinov told him, "the sound of which has always seemed to me the most civilised music in the universe."
