“The whole thing about acting is that you draw on other people’s experiences,” he said.
Ben Cross, the actor best known to one generation for playing a determined runner in the Academy Award-winning film “Chariots of Fire” and to another audience decades later for his role in a reboot of “Star Trek,” died on Tuesday after a short illness. He was 72. His daughter Lauren announced his death, after an unspecified illness, on Mr. Cross’s Facebook page. She said he had died in Vienna, The Associated Press reported. The 1981 film “Chariots of Fire” tells the story of two British track stars in the 1924 Olympics who are competing for something greater than medals and world records. Mr. Cross trained daily for two and a half months to play the role of Harold Abrahams, a furiously competitive athlete and son of Jewish immigrants looking to become visible in an Anglo-Saxon society. In 2009, Mr. Cross appeared in a reboot of the “Star Trek” film franchise, playing Spock’s father, Sarek, who imparts this bit of advice to this son: “What is necessary is never unwise.” In a 1983 interview, Mr. Cross described his acting style as “a method, not The Method.” “The whole thing about acting is that you draw on other people’s experiences,” he said. “I watch them and I listen to them. How I play it is my instinctive interpretation.
