Anthony Dawson

Anthony Douglas Gillon Dawson was a Scottish actor born in Edinburgh on 18 October 1916, the son of Ida Violet (Kittel) and Eric Francis Dawson. He trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and served during World War II before beginning his screen career with They Met in the Dark in 1943. A string of notable British productions followed, including The Way to the Stars (1945), The Queen of Spades (1948), and The Wooden Horse (1950).

In the early 1950s Dawson relocated to the United States, where he appeared on Broadway in 1952 in Dial M for Murder, playing the role of C. A. Swann/Captain Lesgate. Alfred Hitchcock subsequently cast him in the same role for the 1954 film adaptation, in which his character is blackmailed by Tony Wendice, played by Ray Milland, into killing Wendice's wife Margot, played by Grace Kelly. In his unpublished memoirs, Rambling Recollections, Dawson described receiving a personal phone call from Hitchcock informing him he had the part, recalling that he felt dazed, electrified, and stunned by the news. The film also brought him significant international visibility and helped establish his reputation for portraying menacing supporting characters.

Dawson became a frequent collaborator of director Terence Young, appearing in They Were Not Divided (1950), Valley of Eagles (1951), and several later productions including The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders (1965), Triple Cross (1966), Red Sun (1971), Inchon (1982), and The Jigsaw Man (1983). Young cast him as Professor Dent, the henchman in the first James Bond film, Dr. No (1962), and also as the physical embodiment of Ernst Stavro Blofeld in From Russia with Love (1963) and Thunderball (1965). In those Bond appearances, Dawson's face was never shown on screen, and Blofeld's voice was supplied by Eric Pohlmann. He also appeared in the Italian Bond parody O.K. Connery alongside fellow Bond veterans Adolfo Celi, Lois Maxwell, and Bernard Lee.

Among his other screen credits, Dawson played the villainous Marques Siniestro in Hammer's The Curse of the Werewolf (1961) and appeared in a 1956 episode of the television series The Buccaneers, titled "The Hand of the Hawk," which starred Robert Shaw. His roles diminished in scale after the early 1960s, though he continued working as an actor until the end of his life. Dawson died of cancer in East Sussex on 8 January 1992, at the age of 75.