Ben Cross, Star of ‘Chariots of Fire,’ Dies at 72
A long acting career bridged generations. He was a British Olympic runner in a 1981 Oscar-winning film and Spock’s father in a 2009 “Star Trek” reboot.
Ben Cross, the actor best known to one generation for playing a determined runner in the 1981 Academy Award-winning film “Chariots of Fire” and to another audience decades later for his role in a reboot of “Star Trek,” died on Tuesday at a hospital in Vienna. He was 72.
His daughter, Lauren, confirmed the death but did not specify the cause, though she said it was not Covid-19.
“Chariots of Fire” tells the true story of two track stars representing Britain in the 1924 Paris Olympics who are vying for medals and world records but also for something greater. Mr. Cross played Harold Abrahams, a furiously competitive athlete and a son of Jewish immigrants who fights anti-Semitism as a Cambridge student while seeking visibility in Anglo-Saxon society.
In 2009, Mr. Cross appeared in the “Star Trek” reboot playing Spock’s father, Sarek, who imparts this bit of advice to this son: “What is necessary is never unwise.”
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In between Mr. Cross worked in television and film for decades. At his death he had just completed shooting “The Devil’s Light,” a forthcoming film about an exorcism, according to his representative, Tracy Mapes. She said he would also be seen in the coming movie “Last Letter From Your Lover,” about a journalist who discovers a series of letters depicting a star-crossed love affair from the 1960s.
In a 1983 interview, Mr. Cross described his acting style as “a method, not The Method,” referring to the school of acting that promotes emotionally and psychologically naturalistic performances.
“The whole thing about acting is that you draw on other people’s experiences,” he said. “I watch them and I listen to them. How I play it is my instinctive interpretation.”
Harry Bernard Cross was born on Dec. 16, 1947, in London. His father was an apartment house doorman who struggled to support the family. The younger Mr. Cross quit school at age 15 and worked as a window cleaner, a butcher’s boy and a dishwasher until eventually landing work as a theater stagehand.
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Watching from the wings, by his account, he thought he could perform better, so he auditioned for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and was accepted.
After roles in regional theater and a brief part in Richard Attenborough’s 1977 epic war film “A Bridge Too Far,” Mr. Cross got his break when he joined the cast of a Broadway musical, “I Love My Wife,” which had transferred to London’s West End. Then came another musical, “Chicago,” in which he was performing when he read for a role in “Chariots of Fire.”
After getting the part he trained daily for two and a half months to prepare for it.
The film co-starred Ian Charleson as Eric Liddell, a Scottish Presbyterian missionary who refuses to take part in the Games on the Sabbath. Mr. Charleson died of AIDS in 1990 at 40. (The movie also starred Ian Holm, who died in June.)
“Chariots of Fire” won the Academy Award for best picture. Vincent Canby of The New York Times declared the film, with a stirring Oscar-winning score by the Greek composer Vangelis, “unashamedly rousing, invigorating” and a “very cleareyed evocation of values of the old-fashioned sort that are today more easily satirized than celebrated.”
Mr. Canby described Mr. Cross as “handsome in a Byronic way” and wrote that he was “tough, abrasive and completely believable as the low-born but richly bred Cambridge student who fights for his rights with a mixture of extroverted charm and naked ambition, which shocks the Caius College dons.”
Mr. Cross and Mr. Charleson “are so good,” Mr. Canby wrote, “that one wonders why it’s taken even this long for them to receive the kind of attention that each will certainly enjoy from this film forward.”
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Mr. Cross went on to gather numerous credits in films, television series and TV movies, but his “Chariots of Fire” performance would be his high-water mark.
Mr. Cross’s marriages to Penny Butler, in 1977, and to Michele Mörth, in 1996, ended in divorce. He married Deyana Boneva in 2018. In addition to his daughter, Lauren, from his first marriage, he is survived by his wife as well as a son from his first marriage, Theo, and three grandchildren.
After the success of “Chariots of Fire,” Mr. Cross seemed to go out of his way to avoid being typecast as a Harold Abrahams kind of character again.
After a man spotted him at a New York hotel in 1983 and said, “Say, aren’t you that guy from ‘Chariots of Fire?,’” Mr. Cross responded by deliberately lighting a cigarette in front of him.
“I wanted to disillusion him,” Mr. Cross said. “I am a smoker, and until people stop identifying me with ‘Chariots of Fire,’ I will continue to smoke.”
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He also put distance between himself and the sport portrayed in the film. “The only running I do now is from the tax man,” he said.
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