Researching Robert Russell

He made numerous appearances on UK television, often playing tough characters and villains due to his imposing stature, including The Avengers, The Sweeney, Space: 1999, Blake's 7 and Doctor Who, playing a guard in the serial entitled The Power of the Daleks and a Highland Games Champion, The Caber, in Terror of the Zygons. Some of his other film appearances included Othello (1965), The Whisperers (1967), Bedazzled (1967) with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, Inspector Clouseau (1968), The Breaking of Bumbo (1970), Man in the Wilderness (1971) with Richard Harris, Sitting Target (1972), Double Exposure (1977), Queen of the Blues (1979) starring Mary Millington, Ivanhoe (1982), Oliver Twist (1982), and the TV film of The Sign of Four (1983).

He lived for the last 14 years of his life in Maidenhead, Berkshire and died there of a heart attack at his home aged 71.

Russell's father, Charles Robert Tilden Russell, was an officer in the Royal Navy. He was educated at Winchester College before attending Trinity College, Cambridge and then, in 1893, joining the Indian Civil Service.

Together with an amateur archaeologist, Rai Bahadur Hira Lal, Russell compiled The Castes and Tribes of the Central Provinces, published in 1916. This work was a product of the Ethnographic Survey of India that had been established in 1901, although it differed somewhat from earlier publications of similar origin because it relied more on Vedic literature than on the anthropometric methods and theories of Herbert Hope Risley and his sympathisers as a mechanism for investigation of the racial origins of caste. According to Crispin Bates, this "highly anecdotal book" was influenced by Émile Senart's Les Castes dans L'Inde and

Russell died when the SS Persia was torpedoed and sank off the coast of Crete on 30 December 1915.