One Week With John Gulliver - Ghost star in high spirits!

Published: 29 April, 2010

WHATEVER happened to that erstwhile heartthrob David Rintoul I wondered after spotting him in a gripping vignette in the successful Roman Polanski film, The Ghost?
In the film, he plays the part of an anguished father who lost his son in the Iraq war.
But in the early 1980s he was the heartthrob of schoolgirls as he played Mr Darcy in a TV adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.
“Pride and Prejudice was part of the school syllabus then,” he told me.  “I would get sack-loads of letters.
“The postman would walk up to my house and literally empty a sack of letters.”
Modestly, he added: “It was Jane Austen after all.”
Apart from his part in The Ghost, David is now playing Charles Dickens in Andersen’s English at the Hampstead Theatre, a performance which has attracted heady reviews from the critics.
David, now aged 61, told me what it was like being directed by Polanski, who is barred from entering the UK because of sexual offences in the US. The film was shot in Germany which doesn’t have an extradition agreement with the US.
He told me: “He is not someone you would want to cross or not be giving your all for, but I got the impression that as long as you were there for the right reasons, he’d get on well with you.”
Now that David’s agent is finding him lots of work, perhaps we will hear more of this very under-rated actor.