Alexander Knox

Alexander Knox (January 16, 1907 – April 25, 1995) was a Canadian actor and writer born in Strathroy, Ontario, where his father served as a minister of the Presbyterian Church. Over a career spanning from the 1920s through the late 1980s, Knox appeared in more than 100 film, television, and theatrical productions. He graduated from the University of Western Ontario before relocating to Boston, Massachusetts, to perform with the Boston Repertory Theatre. When that company dissolved following the stock market crash of 1929, Knox returned to London, Ontario, and spent two years working as a reporter for The London Advertiser. He subsequently moved to London, England, where he appeared in several films during the 1930s and took on various roles at the Old Vic, including the Judge in George Bernard Shaw's Geneva. At the 1939 Malvern Festival, he performed in Shaw's In Good King Charles's Golden Days, and his own play Old Master was staged there as well.

Knox's Broadway career ran from 1940 to 1949. He starred opposite Jessica Tandy in the 1940 production of Jupiter Laughs and played Friar Laurence in Romeo and Juliet alongside Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier. He also appeared on Broadway in the play The Three Sisters and the drama Jason. In 1949, Knox and his wife, American actress Doris Nolan, whom he had married in 1944, co-starred in The Closing Door, a play Knox himself wrote. The couple had a son, Andrew Joseph Knox, born in 1947, who became an actor and appeared in Doctor on the Go before his death by suicide in 1987.

In 1944, producer Darryl F. Zanuck selected Knox to portray American President Woodrow Wilson in the biographical film Wilson. The performance earned Knox a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Drama and a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor. His other significant film roles included The Sea Wolf (1941), None Shall Escape (1944), Over 21 (1945), Sister Kenny (1946), Man in the Saddle (1951), Paula (1952), Europa '51 (1952), and The Vikings (1958). Later in his career he appeared in supporting roles in The Damned (1963), Modesty Blaise (1966), and Nicholas and Alexandra (1971). In 1962 he portrayed Governor Hudson Inverest in the second episode of the first season of The Saint, and in 1979 he played Control in the BBC miniseries adaptation of John le Carré's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Knox frequently collaborated with director Joseph Losey, a fellow American blacklistee based in the United Kingdom.

Knox's career in the United States was hampered during the McCarthy era by his liberal views and his involvement with the Committee for the First Amendment, though he was not formally blacklisted. He subsequently based the remainder of his career in the United Kingdom. As a writer, Knox authored adventure novels set in the Great Lakes region during the 19th century, among them Bride of Quietness (1933), Night of the White Bear (1971), The Enemy I Kill (1972, republished as Totem Dream in 1973), Raider's Moon, and The Kidnapped Surgeon. He also wrote plays and at least three detective novels under a pseudonym before 1945. Knox died of bone cancer in Berwick-upon-Tweed on April 25, 1995. His wife Doris Nolan survived him until 1998.