The storyteller who entranced the world

There were so many sides to Sir Peter Ustinov that sometimes it was hard to keep track of them all. Oscar-winning actor, playwright, raconteur, polyglot, satirist, interviewer, opera director, journalist, art collector and, for past 30 years, roving ambassador for Unicef, he was the Renaissance man who put the Renaissance to shame.

His myriad interests and achievements were reflected in his eclectic background. The only son of an artist mother who was half Russian, a quarter Italian and a quarter French, and a journalist father who was half Russian and half German, Ustinov claimed also to have Swiss and Ethiopian blood - everything, he took great pleasure in telling people, except English. "Ethnically filthy," as he liked to describe himself.

In Britain, the star, who died yesterday in Swizerland, will perhaps be best remembered for playing Agatha Christie's Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. But in a career which spanned more than 60 years - and took in two Oscars for best supporting actor, for his performances in Spartacus and Topkapi in the 1960s - he played everything from the Emperor Nero to Babar the Elephant, by way of the Walrus in Alice in Wonderland, Blackbeard the pirate and Charlie Chan.

Ustinov was the first to admit that laughter had been a lifelong drug, confessing: "I was irrevocably betrothed to laughter, the sound of which has always seemed to me to be the most civilised music in the world."

The role he played to best effect was undoubtedly himself. His oneman show was a perennial success with audiences around the world as he kept them amused with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of witty anecdotes and wry impressions - everyone from King Hussein of Jordan to the Queen, not to mention a very passable imitation of a camel - delivered in any one of half a dozen languages.

Born in London - Swiss Cottage - on 16 April 1921, Ustinov had a difficult childhood. His father was a feckless but domineering man nicknamed Klop, who persuaded his artist wife to destroy any of her paintings he did not like. Later he was redeemed in his son's eyes when he was revealed to have been a masterspy for the Allies during the war.

Ustinov was educated at Westminster School, but hated it and left - without qualification or distinction - at 16. Perhaps he had better things to do: one of his early schoolmasters wrote on his report: "This boy shows great originality which must be curbed at all costs."

He was certainly nothing if not precocious. He made his first venture into journalism at the age of 14 with a satirical piece for a London newspaper about a fellow pupil, the son of the German ambassador von Ribbentrop.

At the London Theatre Studio he rapidly made a name for himself as an actor and writer in revue. By the time he was 19 he had appeared in his first revue and had his first stage play presented in London. By his mid-twenties he was a prominent wit in both theatre and cinema.

Ustinov was called up into the Army and served for a time as David Niven's batman. He found himself working on an official film, A School For Secrets, at the Malvern radar establishment.

To the fury of his fellow privates, he was assigned a car and driver, a suite of rooms, two WAAFs to bring him tea and dust his rifle, and a pass which said: "This man may go anywhere and do anything at his discretion."

But later, during the war, he told an officers' selection board that he had a preference for tanks "because you can go into battle sitting down".

Inevitably, the board issued a warning: "On no account must this man be put in charge of others."

He married his first wife, Isolde, when he was 19, a young woman who, it was claimed, was totally ignorant of the facts of life, although they were to have one child.

His second wife, Suzanne, was a beautiful but deeply troubled French Canadian actress. That marriage was dissolved in 1971, with Ustinov winning custody of their three children.

Of his third wife, H鬨ne, he said: "She has made me into something approaching the man I once hoped to be, privately and secretly."

Ustinov wrote numerous plays, the most successful of which was The Love of Four Colonels in which he starred with Moira Lister. But his style, which tended towards the whimsical, allegorical and long-winded, drifted out of fashion by the late Fifties.

From the 1960s, he concentrated on a series of mostly forgettable film roles, although he did win Oscars for the best supporting actor in Spartacus and Topkapi.

For all that, his finest achievement on screen was probably the film he wrote and directed of Billy Budd, which introduced Terence Stamp to the cinema. In addition he was writing novels, making spectacular oneman stage appearances and producing newspaper columns.

The great critic James Agate once said of him: "Ustinov is whipped by something which must be genius since it cannot be talent, for the first characteristic of talent is the taking of trouble, and I suspect that Ustinov never takes any."

His ability to remember anecdotes and recall incidents amazed his friends. He never committed anything to paper, but he once explained: "I work on training the memory by a very complicated numerical and letter system of my own, which is a secret.

"I do that in case I am ever put in prison by mistake, which seems more and more likely these days. I'd have to have something to occupy the mind because I presume that in the kind of prison I'd be put into, there would be no paper allowed and no sharp objects."

Some people have said that Ustinov spread himself too thinly. He was invariably dashing around the world from his home in Switzerland, promoting books, making TV series, recording voice-overs, writing newspaper articles or speaking at seminars and literary lunches.

While audiences loved him, his dilettantish - not to say lighthearted - ways often failed to make a favourable impression with the critics. An unusually sunny production of Mozart's Don Giovanni was panned in 1973, while his 1983 book My Russia was regarded as a whitewash: Mark Almond, the Oxford history don, wrote: "He has few ideas, and they are wrong and repeated at length." When he was knighted in 1990, his main worry was how to reply to the invitation from Buckingham Palace. Ustinov recalled: "The invitation said, 'Delete whichever is inapplicable: I can kneel - I cannot kneel.' But there was nothing for those who can kneel but not get up."

Once he said: "Obviously the British are the toughest nail because I started here. Here it is as a comedian that I am best known. I am not known as that anywhere else. And that is why I find living in Switzerland rather emollient, because I get over the bruises much more quickly."

In the late 1960s he was asked to act as master of ceremonies at a Unicef concert in Paris. He knew little about the organisation, but over the years his involvement grew, and he became its goodwill ambassador in

1971. He was also president of an obscure "Utopian" lobby called the World Federalists and last year was honoured with a graduate college named after him at Durham University, where he was chancellor.

Politically, his opinions got him into trouble more than once. In the early 1990s he faced criticism for his controversial views on the emergence of Russia from communist rule, and for his unstinting support for Mikhail Gorbachev - a great friend - but his long service on behalf of Unicef led UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to joke that Ustinov was the man to take over from him.

Whether it was genius or talent Ustinov seemed to master everything he attempted. His onefootlong entry in Who's Who - written by himself - describes in a matterof-fact way all the output of his extraordinary career. But he later apologised for this entry as being "a little tasteless".

He once summed himself up as "too many eggs and not enough basket", a description that was to make his older self cringe with embarrassment. "That sounds vain to me," he said later. "As if I'm comparing myself to caviar."

Work seemed to be what kept him going: when ambushed at a UN lunch by the BBC for This Is Your Life, he demurred with the words "Not now - I have to write my column." But perhaps he was best summed up by a story he liked to tell against himself. On his 70th birthday he told his four children that he had reached the time of life when he would soon have to decide what he wanted to do with it.

"My son was rather charming. He said, 'Don't hurry'."