NOW THERE'S A RESUME:

Peter Ustinov, Oscar-Winning Actor, Dies at 82 (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 3/29/04)

Peter Ustinov, the hair-trigger wit with the avuncular charm whose 60-year-career amounted to a revovling series of star turns as actor, playwright, novelist, director and raconteur, died Sunday at a clinic near his home in Bursins, Switzerland. He was 82.

Mr. Ustinov had suffered for years from the effects of diabetes and, more recently, a weakened heart. His death was announced by Leon Davico, a friend and former spokesman for Unicef, for which Mr. Ustinov worked for many years.

Mr. Ustinov, a cosmopolitan, corpulent and full-bearded six-footer whose ancestors were prominent in czarist Russia, was a prodigy who began mimicking his parents' guests at the age of 2. He wrote his first play, "House of Regrets," in his teens; it opened in London to glowing reviews when he was 21.

As an actor, Mr. Ustinov won international stardom as a languid, quirky Nero in the 1951 sword-and-sandal epic Quo Vadis?, gained increasing stature by playing sly rogues, and became one of the few character actors to hold star status for decades, adjusting easily to movies, plays, broadcast roles and talk shows, which he enlivened with hilarious imitations and pungent one-liners.

The entertainer's many honors included two supporting-actor Academy Awards for portraying a shrewd slave dealer in Spartacus in 1960 and a clumsy jewel thief in Topkapi in 1964. He received three Emmys for television performances: in the title role of "The Life of Samuel Johnson" in 1958, as Socrates in "Barefoot in Athens" in 1966 and as a rural shopkeeper who gains compassion from a youngster in "A Storm in Summer" in 1970. He won a Grammy for narrating Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf" in a concert conducted by Herbert von Karajan and also directed operas and his plays in half a dozen European cities.