Primarily a character actor, he often played Nazi officers in World War II films, and other antagonistic authority figures.

His father, Solomon Pollack, was a Jewish shop-owner who managed to avoid internment and survived Nazi rule in Germany.

The audio commentary for the Doctor Who serial Silver Nemesis mentions that he left in 1936 to escape persecution due to his homosexuality.

Other accounts point to him leaving in 1939 and settling in Canada, where he was interned in 1940, which is unlikely as he appears in the Ealing Studios film Convoy (released in July 1940, as the officer of U-37, in an uncredited role).

[3] Some of his other roles as German characters were in The Heroes of Telemark (1965), The Blue Max (1966), Where Eagles Dare (1968), Zeppelin (1971), as SS officer Reinhard Heydrich in Operation Daybreak (1975) and the football match commentator in Escape to Victory (1981), although he also played a Polish parachutist in The Red Beret (1953).

[5] In the Italian war movie Uccidete Rommel, shot in the Egyptian desert in 1969, he played the role of a British officer of the SAS.