Marius Re Goring, (23 May 191230 September 1998) was a British stage and screen actor. He is best remembered for the four films he made with Powell & Pressburger, particularly as Conductor 71 in A Matter of Life and Death and as Julian Craster in The Red Shoes. He is also known for playing the title role in the long-running TV drama series, The Expert. He regularly performed French and German roles, and was frequently cast in the latter because of his name, coupled with his red-gold hair and blue eyes. However, in a 1965 interview, he explained that he was not of German descent, stating that "Goring is a completely English name." Life and career Goring was born in Newport, Isle of Wight, the son of the eminent physician and researcher Dr Charles Buckman Goring (1870-1919), the author of The English Convict, and Kate Winifred (née Macdonald, 1874–1964), a professional pianist of Scottish descent who was also a suffragette. He had an older brother, Donald, who died in Yemen, in 1936, from injuries sustained in a motor vehicle accident. After attending The Perse School in Cambridge, where he became a friend of an older boy, the future documentary film maker Humphrey Jennings, Goring studied modern languages at the universities of Frankfurt, Munich, Vienna and Paris. Encouraged by both of his parents to pursue his acting ambitions, he made his professional debut in 1927 playing Harlequin, and toured the continent playing classical roles with the Compagnie des Quinze. He toured under the directorship of Michel Saint-Denis, whom he would later encourage to come to England and work as a director. He also studied under Harcourt Williams and at the Old Vic dramatic school from 1929 to 1932. His early stage career included appearances at the Old Vic, Sadler's Wells, Stratford and several European tours; he was fluent in French and German. During the 1930s, he played a variety of Shakespearean roles at the Old Vic, including the title role in Macbeth and Romeo in Romeo and Juliet (1933), Feste in Twelfth Night (1937), in addition to Trip in Sheridan's The School for Scandal. He first worked in the West End in a 1934 revival of Granville-Barker's The Voysey Inheritance at the Shaftesbury Theatre. In 1929, he became a founding member of British Equity, the actors' union, served on its council from 1949 and was three times its vice-president from 1963