Warner was also tied to various franchises, including “Star Trek.” He played two unrelated roles in “Star Trek” movies. The actor made three films with director Sam Peckinpah: “The Ballad of Cable Hogue” (1970), in which his performance as a somewhat eccentric minister marked one of his first feature appearances, 1971’s “Straw Dogs” and 1977 WWII thriller “Cross of Iron.” Other significant credits from this period include Terry Gilliam’s 1981 “Time Bandits,” in which Warner played a villain simply called Evil, and 1985’s “The Company of Wolves,” director Neil Jordan’s exploration into the Red Riding Hood fairy tale in which Warner starred with Angela Lansbury. In 1982’s “Tron,” boasting then-state-of-the-art special effects, Warner is a villain named Dillinger who steals the plans for some video games and breaks down our hero, played by Jeff Bridges, into the ones and zeroes that represent life within the computer, where the two battle in a landscape within that world that was unlike anything that had been seen before. He fairly shakes with moral indignation as he describes a typical bat cave with ‘millions of bats wrestling, fighting, mating, hanging upside down…They are the quintessence of eeevilll!’ “ Warner is quite funny - intentionally, I suspect - when he attempts to explain his fanaticism. The same year Warner starred with Nick Mancuso in killer-bat horror film “Nightwing” (the New York Times said: “Mr. Wells, who turns out to be a chilling Jack the Ripper, in the excellent 1979 thriller “Time After Time,” which posits that Wells actually created the time machine he described in his book Wells (played by Malcolm McDowell, who himself usually played villains) must follow Warner’s Jack the Ripper into the future, to contemporary San Francisco, in an effort to defeat him. He was subjected to a memorable decapitation in the film. In 1976’s “The Omen,” one of the seminal horror movies of the 1970s, he played Jennings, the photographer who develops images on which the specific manner of death for the individuals depicted is superimposed.
The mid ’70s and to mid ’80s probably represented the zenith of the actor’s career. He played a simian senator in Tim Roth’s 2001 reimagining of “Planet of the Apes” and a doctor in the 2005 hit comedy “Ladies in Lavender.” He was among the large cast of James Cameron’s 1997 epic “Titanic” but was wasted in the role of a thug-like butler. Recently, Warner appeared in Disney’s “Mary Poppins Returns” in 2018, “You, Me and Him” in 2017 and on Showtime’s “Penny Dreadful” as Professor Abraham Von Helsing in 2014. He reprised the role of the Nazi Heydrich in the 1985 telepic “Hitler’s S.S.: Portrait in Evil.” Warner was Emmy-nominated for playing Reinhard Heydrich, a Nazi official who was a key architect of the Final Solution, in the landmark 1978 miniseries “Holocaust,” and won an Emmy for playing the sadistic Roman political opportunist Pomponius Falco in the 1981 miniseries “Masada.”
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