David Warner was a distinguished English Shakespearean actor, in fact one of the great stage Hamlets of his generation but, in movie terms, and especially as he got older, his strong, intelligent face and equine handsomeness almost made him the English Max von Sydow, eminently castable in supporting character roles as troubled or darkly villainous people in scary films.
It was Warner’s destiny to have one of the most macabre and shocking death scenes in movie history in the classic 1976 chiller The Omen, a stomach-turningly horrible coup which he endured in the role of Keith, the long-haired and wild-eyed photographer who notices that there is something very wrong with the cherubic baby adopted by the US ambassador and his wife: Gregory Peck and Lee Remick. The climatically gruesome moment comes when Peck soft-heartedly refuses to use the special antichrist-killing daggers on the child and throws them away. Keith defiantly picks them up, saying he will use them himself, at which point dark forces release the handbrake on a builder’s truck parked nearby with an inadequately secured sheet of plateglass in the back. This shoots out, decapitating Keith. I remember literally jumping out of my seat in the cinema when I first saw Warner’s fake prosthetic head spinning up into the air, and at the dawn of the VHS age, this horribly ingenious spectacle was repeatedly savoured by generations of horror fans on pause and rewind.
