He began violin lessons when he was eight and by the age of 14 was earning his first wages playing in a cinema band accompanying silent films. By this time – with a view to learning a respectable trade – he had also become apprenticed to a bookbinder; but his heart was not in his work.Music was gradually beginning to dominate his life. He played in the local amateur orchestra and in a string quartet; here he immediately fell in love with the sound of the cello, bought one and taught himself to play. Two years later he abandoned the violin and began taking lessons with K.P. S?o, who he claimed was “the finest cello teacher in Prague” This was a turning point in the young boy’s life.

Milos Zatvrzsky (Milos S?o), cellist: born Prague 13 April 1912; married first Ludmila Jezkova (died 1977; three children), second 1988 Eva Houdkova; died Prague 14 October 2003.
The Czech cellist Milos S?o was one of the most important and influential figures in the musical activities of post-war Prague. She predeceased him, and he is survived by his second wife, Margaret.Tom Vallance. The Czech cellist Milos S?o was one of the most important and influential figures in the musical activities of post-war Prague. He played the same character in Puppet Master 4 (1993), Puppet Master 5: the final chapter (1994) and Retro Puppet Master (1999).Rolfe’s first wife was the Scottish actress Jane Aird, who had a supporting role in one of his films, Dance Little Lady (1954). He also featured in the epic productions Taras Bulba (1962), The Fall of the Roman Empire (1963) and Nicholas and Alexandra (1971). Occasional television work included roles in The Saint, The Avengers and Space 1999.In 1991 Rolfe became known to fans of gory horror movies with his portrayal of Toulon, the kindly but crazed creator of living puppets who wages war against a group of Nazis who want to create an army of zombies in Puppet Master III: Toulon’s revenge. He was Caiphas in Nicholas Ray’s King of Kings (1961), and played the title role of a man whose face has been frozen into a wide grin in Mr Sardonicus (1961).

He was top-billed as an officer in the India of 1826 uncovering a cult of killer thuggees in The Stranglers of Bombay (1959), made by Hammer Films in a process they called “Strangloscope”. He was splendid as the wicked usurper Prince John in Richard Thorpe’s lively version of Ivanhoe (1952) and as the scheming Ned Seymour who sends his own brother to the executioner’s block in George Sidney’s Young Bess (1953). The latter film was made in Hollywood, and during his brief stay in the film capital Rolfe also played the leader of rebel tribesmen in Henry King’s rousing King of the Khyber Rifles (1953) and an evil vizier in George Sherman’s Veils of Bagdad (1953).Later roles included a rare comic role as a sea captain trying to conceal from a visiting admiral the presence of girls on his ship in Girls at Sea (1958) and the troubled padre in Val Guest’s bleak war movie Yesterday’s Enemy (1959). The next thing I knew, I was lying in the mud and who should be picking me up and wrapping me in his camel-hair coat but Guy Rolfe, so I changed my opinion of him after that.He settled into a career as a character actor, frequently cast as goateed villains. His co-star Rona Anderson told the historian Brian McFarlane, Guy was a strange, very saturnine man who used to play vingt-et-un for money – and always used to win – while we were sitting around on the set. I was rather dubious about him, but one day I had a scene where I had to ride a horse, but the thing went out of control I couldn’t make it stop. In Sanatorium, the third and most substantial of the episodes, Rolfe was to play a retired army officer, a philanderer who finds true love with a fellow patient (Jean Simmons) at a TB sanatorium and marries her though knowing that one or both of them may die.

The director Ken Annakin explained, “Guy was dropped when, sadly, he actually came down with consumption like the character in the film.” He was replaced by the equally lean Michael Rennie.Although Rolfe was out of circulation for less than a year, the impetus of his career was lost, and he returned to the screen in a B movie, Home to Danger (1951). Rolfe said at the time, “A strange friendship based on mutual respect develops.” When the policeman is given a position in espionage detection prior to the outbreak of the First World War, he enlists the criminal’s help in cracking an enemy safe that holds a list of spies operating in France. Rolfe then had the finest of his leading-man roles, that of a brilliant safe-cracker in the Paris of 1913 in Robert Hamer’s The Spider and the Fly (1949).The audacious talent of the criminal wins the admiration of the police chief (Eric Portman), with whom he plays a series of cat-and-mouse games. The film, a superior blend of suspense, sophistication, wit, romance and irony, consolidated Rolfe’s stardom.He then played leading man to Jean Kent in the Napoleonic romp The Reluctant Widow (1950) and was given top billing in Prelude to Fame (1950), as the music patron who discovers a child prodigy (Jeremy Spenser) in Italy Then came a bitter irony.

Rolfe was cast in one of the three stories by Somerset Maugham that formed the basis for the compendium film Trio (1950). A weak comedy, Fools Rush In (1948), in which he played the father of a panic-stricken bride (Sally Ann Howes), preceded his starring role in Terence Fisher’s intriguing mystery Portrait from Life (1948).The leading performances won praise in this compelling drama in which Rolfe played a British army officer who helps an Austrian professor (Arnold Marle) track down his missing daughter (Mai Zetterling), after her likeness is noted in a picture painted by an alcoholic artist (Robert Beatty). He then worked in repertory in the UK, and made his film d?t with a fleeting role in the lavish Korda production Knight Without Armour (1937) starring Marlene Dietrich and Robert Donat and directed by Jacques Feyder. Another Korda production, The Drum (1938), directed by Zoltan Korda, followed.After the Second World War Rolfe returned to the screen with further small roles, in such films as Carol Reed’s masterly drama Odd Man Out (1946, as a policeman) and Charles Frank’s ripe melodrama Uncle Silas (1947) before finally making a strong impact when cast as the pilot of a passenger aeroplane that crashes in the Alps in Ken Annakin’s Broken Journey (1947). His gaunt presence, reminiscent of Hollywood’s John Carradine, also graced several horror films, and he became known to a new audience in the Nineties with his portrayal of the insane Andr?oulon in the series of “Puppet Master” films.Born Edwin Arthur Rolfe in Kilburn, London, in 1911, and educated at a state school, “Guy” Rolfe had brief careers as a racing driver and boxer before making his stage d?t in Ireland in 1935. In 1992, in recognition of his achievement as editor, publisher and writer, Huon was presented with the Collier de l’Hermine by Pierre LeTreut, Vice-President of the Regional Council of Brittany and President of the Institut Culturel de Bretagne, the only award he ever received for a lifetime’s labours.Ronan Huon would not have sought any honour outside Brittany, for the deep satisfaction he found in serving the language and literature of his native land was reward enough for this modest, genial and unremittingly generous man.Meic Stephens.