James Aubrey | British actor, 62
James Aubrey, 62, a British actor who had his first role when he was an untrained schoolboy, portraying Ralph, the right-minded boy who strove to ward off the savagery of his fellow castaways, in the 1963 film Lord of the Flies , died of pancreatitis April 6, at his home in Cranwell in central England.
James Aubrey, 62, a British actor who had his first role when he was an untrained schoolboy, portraying Ralph, the right-minded boy who strove to ward off the savagery of his fellow castaways, in the 1963 film
Lord of the Flies
, died of pancreatitis April 6, at his home in Cranwell in central England.
Mr. Aubrey had a busy career on stage and television in England, where he performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Royal Court Theater, Birmingham Rep, and the Cambridge Theater Company, and where he was probably best known as Gavin Sorenson, an American interloper in a British family, in the steamy, soapy mid-1970s series Bouquet of Barbed Wire and its sequel, Another Bouquet.
He was, however, one of those cultural figures who begins at a peak of recognition and spends a professional lifetime unable to reascend the heights. He was just 13 and living in Jamaica when director Peter Brook saw him at a swimming pool and selected him to lead the adolescent ensemble for Lord of the Flies, an adaptation of William Golding's grim fable about British schoolboys who survive a plane crash on a remote island and devolve into barbarians.
Ralph, Mr. Aubrey's character, barely manages to hold on to his humanity, but he is the story's hero, defending the chubby, asthmatic Piggy (Hugh Edwards) against bullies and resisting a turn toward savagery.
After Lord of the Flies, Mr. Aubrey's film roles were considerably less prominent. His credits included Galileo, Joseph Losey's 1975 biography of the 17th-century astronomer; The Hunger (1983), a vampire story starring Catherine Deneuve; and Cry Freedom (1987), Richard Attenborough's South African apartheid drama. - N.Y. Times News Service