Gertan Klauber

Corpulent, bushy-browed Czechoslovakian-born character actor Gertan Klauber was a familiar face on British television, appearing in anything from 'Carry On' comedies to playing a Roman galley master in Doctor Who (1963). In Britain from an early age, he studied acting in Birmingham before moving to London in the mid-1950's. Over the next four decades, he trod the boards of the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Arts Theatre and the National Theatre, as well as acting in several drama series for BBC TV. His stock-in-trade was a fluency in Eastern and Central European dialects, as a result of which he was often typecast as spies, border guards, waiters, minor officials and oily second-string villains. As such, he guested on many popular television shows of the day, including The Saint (1962), Secret Agent (1964), and The Prisoner (1967). He was, arguably, at his most amusing, as the mad, penguin-fixated King George III in the final instalment of Blackadder the Third (1987).