Sidney Edmond Jocelyn Ackland was born in North Kensington, London, and studied acting at London's Central School of Speech and Drama. A prolific stage performer, he made his professional debut in the 1945 production
The Hasty Heart. Despite making his film debut in the Boulting Brothers
Seven Days to Noon (1950), he was hardly seen again in films until the 1970s,
when he played a string of characters that often hid various shades of wickedness
beneath a florid complexion and a beaming smile. But the stage gave him
his biggest hit - as Peron in the London production of Evita. In the late
1980s and early 1990s, he mixed scene-stealing character roles with some
really nasty villains, as Greta Scacchi's scheming husband in White Mischief
(1987), and a villainous South African diplomat in Lethal Weapon II (1989).
He was awarded a C.B.E., the Commander of the British Empire. One of his
more familiar portrayals is that of a Russian official in films including
The Hunt for Red October (1990), Citizen X (1995) and K-19: The Widowmaker
(2002).
