Actor David Warner, villain in ‘Titanic,’ ‘Tron’ and more, dies at 80

David Warner, the veteran British actor who racked up more than 200 stage and screen credits, including films such as “Titanic,”

“Tron” and “The Omen,” died Sunday of a cancer-related illness, his family said. He was 80 years old.

Warner’s career spanned six decades, from a star-making turn playing the title role in “Hamlet” with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1965,

when he was just 24, to an array of villainous roles he depicted with characteristic aplomb.

He was the Evil Genius in the 1981 film “Time Bandits,”

and played a bad guy inside and outside a computer in “Tron” (1982), which pioneered the extensive use of computer animation

In “Titanic” (1997), he helps hunt down characters played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet

(Warner had also appeared in a 1979 TV movie depicting the Titanic’s sinking — that time as a more innocuous science teacher.)

The range of his roles was as broad as his list of credits. In 1976, he played an ill-fated photographer in the horror film “The Omen,” and a year later was a German officer in “Cross of Iron.”