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Sir Peter Ustinov, eulogized as a great actor and humorist who made a difference to the world through his good works for children, was buried Saturday in the Swiss village where he lived the last 30 years of his life. "This is an extraordinarily sad occasion, all the more so because Sir Peter was an extraordinarily funny man," said Carol Bellamy, executive director of the United Nations Children's Fund. Ustinov served as a UNICEF goodwill ambassador for 35 years. Ustinov, a latter-day renaissance man, was buried in the village cemetery in Bursins, where he had lived since the early 1970s. About 100 family members and friends attended the burial in the picturesque graveyard overlooking Lake Geneva and the Alps. Earlier, about 300 people attended Ustinov's funeral service in Geneva's historic Cathedral of St. Pierre, where 16th-century religious reformer John Calvin preached. "The world today can ill afford to lose such a source of laughter," Bellamy said in a funeral oration. "The central importance of laughter is a fact that children intuitively understand - and that is why they flocked to him." "The children of the world had no greater champion," she added. "It was a labor of love that brought him face to face with the brutal realities." She said he saw in person child laborers, sick children and youngsters hit by conflict. "Yet such sights never dampened Sir Peter's compassion or his relentless sense of mission, which might find him captivating young audiences in visits to hospitals, schools and shelters - or playing a rousing game of pingpong with children in Egypt, dancing with them in Cambodia or helping to vaccinate them in China. " No movie stars appeared to be present. The crowd was made up of U.N. and Swiss officials and British diplomats as well as admirers primarily from Switzerland and Germany, where the multilingual Ustinov was extremely popular. Leon Davico, a former spokesman for UNICEF who enlisted Ustinov to serve as a goodwill ambassador in the late 1960s and who helped organize the service, said no formal invitations were sent. "His struggle for peace and against human stupidity did more for the world than all the speeches of politicians and ministers put together," Davico said. Israeli Violinist Ivry Gitlis played the Gavotte from the E-major suite for solo violin by Johann Sebastian Bach as sunlight streamed through the stained-glass windows onto the mourners' faces. Gitlis, a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations' Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization, then played a Hebrew lullaby by Ustinov's coffin. Then the 81-year-old Gitlis quipped, "I don't know how much time I've got left. Goodbye - and see you soon." Pastor Henry Babel, who presided at the Protestant religious service, said, "He had the gift of being a great man while remaining a human being. Many great men lose their humanity." A choir of 40 sang Mozart's "Tantum Ergo" and a chamber orchestra played two other pieces by Mozart, one of Ustinov's favorite composers. Ustinov told an interviewer that he moved to Switzerland in 1957 in part "for fiscal reasons," referring to his former wife's desire to escape the high income taxes Britain imposed on his earnings as an actor, author and raconteur. Ustinov, who had been suffering from diabetes, died of heart failure late Sunday night in a clinic near his home village, where he lived in a chateau since 1971. He was 82. Ustinov won Academy Awards for the role of Batiatus, owner of the gladiator school in "Spartacus" (1960), and for Arthur Simpson, an English small-time black marketeer in Turkey who gets caught up in a jewel heist in "Topkapi" (1965). xponent The Greats Maru rob _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
