David Warner, one of the most versatile character actors of the past 60 years, is dead at 80. The British performer could play sickly sweet, side-splitting comedy, or dastardly villain with the skill that made almost every movie he was in better. And there were a lot of them: he appeared in over 220.

Cinephiles might first recognize him for his work with Sam Peckinpah, as the horny preacher who “comforts” widows in “The Ballad of Cable Hogue,” as the drunken reprobate Henry Niles in “Straw Dogs”, and as a Nazi in “Cross of Iron.” He also has an astonishing scene in Richard Donner’s “The Omen,” in which he’s decapitated by a falling piece of sheet glass — the first time a beheading was conveyed so graphically in a Hollywood studio film.

But to more casual moviegoers all around the world he will forever be Billy Zane’s gunsel Lovejoy in “Titanic.