Jeff Goldblum at 70: Why is Hollywood’s most adaptable character actor so underrated?

From low-budget British dramas to the Jurassic Park franchise, audiences will accept the lanky charmer in pretty much anything. So it’s about time, writes Geoffrey Macnab, that he got some real recognition for it

Goldblum is known for his suavity and wit (Getty)

The voice is instantly recognisable: sardonic, humorous, questioning, a little nasal. It is telling the story behind the film of Norman Jewison’s Hollywood musical Fiddler on the Roof, about a Jewish milkman in a turn of the century shetl in Imperial Russia.

At first, you wonder why on earth a big name actor like Jeff Goldblum is narrating Fiddler’s Journey to the Big Screen, a new, low-budget documentary feature screening this week in the Berlin Film Festival market and made to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Fiddler on the Roof. Then you realise that is the whole point about Goldblum’s career. He continually pops up where you least expect it.

The actor turns 70 later this year. He remains the same ubiquitous presence in film and TV that he has been for much of the last 50 years. We’ll be seeing him back in among the dinosaurs later this summer in Jurassic World Dominion, the latest entry in one of the most successful movie franchises in recent movie history. He again plays the brilliant scientist and advocate of chaos theory, Dr Ian Malcolm.