How my late friend Peter Ustinov dispelled the Walt Disney-cryonic freezing urban myth

Sir Peter Ustinov, one of the world’s greatest raconteurs.

Call me Ishmael. Being highly literate, you will recognise the opening line of Herman Melville’s masterpiece Moby-Dick – and you’ll also know that the title does not refer to a porn star but to a whale. But you may not know of another Melville masterpiece, his novella Billy Budd – and you probably haven’t seen the all-but-forgotten movie version by my late friend Peter Ustinov. This leviathan of talent wrote the screenplay for the film, produced it, directed it and co-starred in it – with a malevolent Robert Ryan and an innocent (well, it was 1962 and his first film) Terence Stamp.

One of the world’s greatest raconteurs, Sir Peter Ustinov specialised in portraying grotesques. He appeared as the lubricious slave dealer in Kubrick’s rather silly Spartacus, as Nero in Quo Vadis, and as the monster from the Beowulf legend in our 1981 production of Grendel Grendel Grendel. (I almost forgot. Another grotesque was Hercule Poirot in 1978’sDeath on the Nile. Peter’s Poirot was the antithesis of David Suchet’s prissy incarnation – he sported a big bushy moustache and shambled around Egypt like an unmade bed.)

British actor Peter Ustinov at Adelaide Airport in 1959.

Getting Peter to voice the lead character in Grendel Grendel Grendel – one of the world’s first animated feature films for grown-ups – was one of countless brilliant ideas by my writer/director collaborator Alexander “The Great” Stitt. Other voices included Keith Michell and Arthur Dignam. All since gone to god. Peter joined them in 2004, aged 82.

Before Grendel Grendel Grendel, Alex and I (with songs by Peter Best) had done lots of telly campaigns together, including “Life: Be In It”, “Slip Slop Slap” and “Care for Kids” for the International Year of the Child. Now it was time for the big screen – and a feature film.

For a few weeks we carted Peter around Sydney in a limo. Having dropped him off one evening, the driver turned and said to me: “I’ve got some of his albums.” Albums? It turned out he thought his famous passenger was Burl Ives. When I told Peter this the next day he sighed and said he’d just been accosted by an excited group of women in his hotel lobby crying: “We know who you are!” As he prepared to sign autographs it emerged that his fan club didn’t have the foggiest who he was. “But we saw you on the Mike Walsh Show!” Fame indeed.

Walt Disney and his wife arrive in London in 1938.

My favourite Ustinovian anecdote – and during the making of the film and a subsequent studio interview he told me scores – involved Walt Disney. Peter was making a movie at the Disney Studios when, on December 15, 1966, just in time for Christmas, the great animator ceased being animated. Cause of death: lung cancer. Within hours Peter got a phone call from France. The magazine Paris Match, for whom he wrote a regular column, had a bizarre request: could he organise a photo of the dead Disney for their cover? Understandably reluctant, he rang Walt’s brother and business partner Roy Disney, who breezily gave permission – and soon Peter was standing by the cadaver, complete with toe-tag. “Which proves,” Peter told me, “that the story of Walt being cryonically frozen is an urban myth.”

As I said, Peter’s Billy Budd is a forgotten film. As is our Grendel Grendel Grendel. Should you manage to track either one down, let me know. They’re both wonderful.