Ralph Richardson (Rollerball) Rollerball

Sir Ralph Richardson was seventy-two when he played the Librarian. The role is three or four minutes of screen time. The film's Midpoint sits on those minutes. Richardson — by 1975 one of the four senior knights of mid-century British theatre, along with Olivier, Gielgud, and Redgrave — plays the part as comic absent-mindedness covering total institutional collapse.

A career across the century

Ralph David Richardson was born December 19, 1902, in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. He left school at fifteen, briefly trained as a draftsman, and drifted into the theatre through Birmingham Repertory and the Old Vic in the late 1920s. Through the 1930s and 1940s he became, with Laurence Olivier, the central figure at the Old Vic — co-directing the company with Olivier and John Burrell from 1944, leading the postwar Old Vic seasons that revived British theatre after the war, and becoming the first actor of his generation to be knighted (1947, a year ahead of Olivier, six years ahead of Gielgud).

The signature stage roles ran from Peer Gynt and Falstaff in the late 1940s through Vladimir in Waiting for Godot (alongside Gielgud's Estragon, 1957) to David Storey's Home (1970) and Pinter's No Man's Land (1975). His film career — The Fallen Idol (1948), The Heiress (1949, for which he was Oscar-nominated), Richard III (1955), Doctor Zhivago (1965), The Bed-Sitting Room (1969), O Lucky Man! (1973), Watership Down (1978, voicing the Chief Rabbit), Greystoke (1984, his final film, posthumously Oscar-nominated) — was always a sideline to the stage work.

Of the four senior knights (Olivier, Gielgud, Richardson, Redgrave), Richardson was the strangest as a screen presence — the most ordinary on the surface and the most peculiar underneath. The voice did not flatter the role; it located it. He could play a lighthouse keeper or a colonial governor; he played God in Time Bandits (1981); he voiced the Chief Rabbit in Watership Down (1978). His Times obituary called him "the most human of all our great actors." (wikipedia, britannica)

Why he agreed to play the Librarian

Richardson was, by 1974, doing supporting roles for short money — a few days' work, a single scene, often a comic part — when the script interested him. The Geneva Library scene in Rollerball gave him the kind of part he liked best: a single self-contained set-piece, a comic register over a dark substrate, a long monologue about Dante and a few corrupt Popes. He had played the same kind of part the year before in Lindsay Anderson's O Lucky Man! (1973), and he would play similar single-scene roles through the end of the decade in Watership Down (1978) and Time Bandits (1981). (wikipedia, britannica)

What the scene asks him to do

Richardson is asked to play a man for whom the loss of the entire thirteenth century is a mild administrative irritation. "We've lost those computers with all of the 13th century in them. Not much in the century, just Dante and a few corrupt Popes, but it's so distracting and annoying."^b27

The line carries the film's Midpoint. The world's brain has been scrubbed. The Librarian is gentle, scatty, and entirely unable to fix it; he pleads with Zero — "You don't have to give him a full political briefing... You have to, Zero" — and Zero answers in tautology: "Corporate decisions are made by corporate executives."^b27

Richardson plays the scene so that the comedy and the horror sit on top of each other without canceling each other out. The audience laughs at the "so distracting and annoying"; the audience also understands, by the time the Librarian pleads, that the system the Librarian curates has eaten itself.

"Richardson's Librarian is the single most concentrated piece of casting in the film. You need a man whose voice carries the weight of European civilization, and who can deliver the news that European civilization has been erased as if he were describing a mild office inconvenience. There is one actor on earth, in 1974, who can do that line reading. Norman Jewison got him." — Andrew Nette, Substack (2025)

TV Guide's contemporaneous notice, which was otherwise mixed on the picture, singled the performance out: "The performances of Caan and Richardson are excellent, and the rollerball sequences are fast-paced and interesting." (wikipedia — reception)

After Rollerball

Richardson continued working until his death. He played God in Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits (1981), and shot Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (released 1984) in 1983 — earning a posthumous Oscar nomination for the latter. He died October 10, 1983, in London, at eighty. (wikipedia)