GENEVA - Sir Peter Ustinov (news), a brilliant wit and mimic who won two
Oscars (news - web sites) for an acting career that ranged from the evil
Nero in "Quo Vadis" to the quirky Agatha Christie detective Hercule Poirot,
has died. He was 82.

Ustinov, a renaissance man whose talents included writing plays, movies and
novels as well as directing operas, also devoted himself to the world's
children for more than 30 years as a goodwill ambassador for UNICEF

He died of heart failure Sunday night in a Genolier clinic near his home at
Bursins in Swiss vineyards overlooking Lake Geneva, close friend Leon
Davico told The Associated Press.

"He was a great man. He was a human being. He was a unique person, someone
you could really count on," said Davico, a former UNICEF spokesman.

Born in London on April 16, 1921, the only son of a Russian artist mother
and a journalist father, Ustinov claimed also to have Swiss, Ethiopian,
Italian and French blood — everything except English.

Ustinov delighted in national differences and frequently referred to them
in his works and public appearances. He was — as he noted proudly in his
autobiography "Dear Me" — conceived in St. Petersburg, Russia, baptized in
a village near Stuttgart, Germany, and reared under a succession of
Cameroonian, Irish and German nurses.

His imposing figure, variously described as resembling a teddy bear, a
giant panda or a Georgian frontage, began 12 pounds at birth and stayed
with him throughout his career.

Ustinov made some 90 movies and also wrote books and plays. He directed
films, plays and operas. His narration of Tchaikovsky's "Peter and the
Wolf" won him a Grammy.

Among his film roles were a nomad in the outback who befriends a family
in "The Sundowners," a one-eyed slave in "The Egyptian," Inspector Poirot
in "Death on the Nile," and Abdi Aga, an illiterate tyrant with pretensions
of learning in "Memed My Hawk."

Ustinov won best supporting actor Oscars for the role of Batiatus, owner of
the gladiator school in "Spartacus" (1960), and as Arthur Simpson, an
English small-time black marketeer in Turkey who gets caught up in a jewel
heist in "Topkapi" (1965).

His Nero — the Roman emperor who presided over the throwing of Christians
to the lions — won him a Golden Globe for best supporting actor in the 1951
movie "Quo Vadis."

He also won three television Emmys, portraying the English lexicographer
Samuel Johnson in "Dr. Johnson" and Socrates in "Barefoot in Athens." In "A
Storm in Summer," his Emmy came for playing an aged Jewish delicatessen
owner in Long Island at grips with racial prejudice in the shape of a proud
black youth.

He directed, wrote the screenplay and starred in the 1962 movie "Billy
Budd."

He was performing by age 3, mimicking politicians of the day when his
parents invited Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie for dinner.

His first attempts at acting were in the disguise of a pig in a dramatized
nursery rhyme, as Friar Tuck of Robin Hood fame and as one of three nymphs
tempting Ulysses from an Aegean beach. "Ulysses wisely passed us by," he
recalled.

He was educated at the prestigious Westminster School, but hated it.

Ustinov left Westminster at 16. He appeared in his first revue and had his
first stage play presented in London in 1940, when he was 19.

Ustinov turned producer at 21 when he presented "Squaring the Circle"
shortly before he entered the British army in 1942.

If his plays had a continuing theme, it was a celebration of the little man
bucking the system.

One of his most successful was "The Love of Four Colonels" which ran for
two years in London's West End. Davico, who was starting his career with
UNICEF, asked Ustinov to join the U.N. children's agency as a goodwill
ambassador after seeing the play.

Ustinov later became a staunch advocate for UNESCO (news - web sites), the
United Nations (news - web sites) Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization. "He never said no to anything UNICEF or the rest of United
Nations asked him to do," Davico said.

Davico said Ustinov recently attended a UNICEF event despite needing a
wheelchair — sciatica gave him trouble walking, and diabetes left him with
30 percent vision and foot problems.

Ustinov's long service as a United Nations goodwill ambassador led U.N.
Secretary-General Kofi Annan (news - web sites) to joke that Ustinov was
the man to take over from him.

He later set up a foundation dedicated to understanding between people
across the globe and between generations.

"I think knowing people is the best way of getting rid of prejudices. When
I was young, I was brought up in an atmosphere which was just loaded with
prejudices," he said in 2001.

Michael Winner, who directed Ustinov as Poirot in the 1988
movie "Appointment With Death," described the actor as a "marvelous man, a
great wit, a great raconteur, a man of the world."

"He was a very good actor but he wasn't used as an actor as much as he
should have been because he became famous as Peter Ustinov," Winner told
The Associated Press in a telephone interview.

Ustinov treated getting older the way he treated everything else in his
life — as another experience to be added to his repertoire of anecdotes,
quips and material for books.

When he turned 60 in 1981, Ustinov was asked if he was tempted to take
things a little easier. "I only feel 59," he said.

"But what really surprises me," he added, "is that I don't say many
different things now than I did when I was 20. The only difference is that
having white hair means that people tend to listen now while they never did
before."

It was an attitude that stayed with him as he turned 80.

"Why should one slow down? I don't quite understand it," he said in an
interview with The Associated Press in 2001.

Ustinov's son Igor, a noted sculptor, said his father even viewed his own
mortality with humor. Responding to an interviewer who asked what Ustinov
would like to see inscribed on his tombstone, he reportedly said: "Keep off
the grass."

When he was knighted by the Queen of England in 1990, his main worry was
how to reply to the invitation from Buckingham Palace.

"The invitation said, 'Delete whichever is inapplicable: I can kneel — I
cannot kneel.' But there was nothing for those who can kneel but not get
up," Ustinov recalled.

But he remained active until close to his death, playing himself in the
2003 TV movie "Winter Solstice."

In other late roles, he was the voice of Babar the Elephant, portrayed a
doctor in the film "Lorenzo's Oil," and in 1999 appeared as the Walrus to
Pete Postlethwaite's Carpenter in a multimillion-dollar TV movie version
of "Alice in Wonderland."

Ustinov was married three times, and is survived by his four children and
his third wife.

He had one daughter with his first wife, Isolde Denham, from whom he was
divorced in 1950 after a decade-long marriage.

He married Suzanne Cloutier in 1954. They had two daughters and a son —
Igor. The couple divorced in 1971, the year they moved to Switzerland.

Ustinov married his third wife, Helene du Lau d'Allemans, in 1972.

Funeral arrangements were not available.

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