Actor

Actor

Born: August 29, 1942; Died: September 1, 2014.

Gottfried John, who has died of cancer aged 72, is best known in the UK as Arkady Ourumov, the loose-cannon Soviet general who clashes with 007 in Pierce Brosnan's first James Bond outing, GoldenEye in 1995.

However, John (which is pronounced Yon) also had a distinguished career in German cinema, TV and theatre and worked repeatedly with the esteemed writer-director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. He appeared in many of Fassbinder's films and TV dramas, including The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979) and the sprawling German television drama series Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980).

John was born in Berlin during the Second World War. He never met his father, who apparently was a committed Nazi. There seems to be some doubt about whether his parents were married and John spent much of his childhood in orphanages. As a teenager, he joined his mother in Paris, where he worked as a labourer and as a pavement artist. Returning to Berlin, he attempted to pursue a career in theatre and joined Fassbinder's avant garde company.

Fassbinder was about to emerge as one of the most important figures in the New German Cinema movement of the 1970s and John was part of his regular troupe. John never looked like the classic romantic lead and had a shifty, rough quality equally well suited to the sleazy journalist in Fassbinder's Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven (1975) and the rogue Soviet general in league with the double agent 006, Alec Trevelyan (Sean Bean) in GoldenEye.

Fassbinder died in 1982 and increasingly John worked with foreign film-makers, though he had already played a film star's sinister chauffeur in Billy Wilder's penultimate film Fedora in 1978. Despite the long-term association with Fassbinder, John was in no way restricted to arthouse dramas and he appeared opposite Emmanuelle star Sylvia Kristel in Mata Hari (1985) and played the KGB officer who the West are trying to get to defect in Granada Television's Len Deighton adaptation Game, Set and Match (1988).

In GoldenEye he was the officer in charge of a Soviet space programme. The film begins with a dramatic sequence in which it seems like he kills 006. Years later it transpires that, not only is Trevelyan still alive, but he and Ourumov are a team, pursuing their own fiendish plans. Bond memorably pursues Ourumov through St Petersburg in a tank.

John played Julius Caesar in the live-action Asterix and Obelix Take on Caesar (1999), with Gerard Depardieu, and was a hostage of a South American guerrilla group in the Russell Crowe movie Proof of Life (2000). Other later credits include The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes (2005) and Flood (2007). He is survived by his wife Barbara.