Basil Rathbone

Philip St. John Basil Rathbone was born on 13 June 1892, in Johannesburg, South African Republic, to Edgar Philip Rathbone, a mining engineer descended from the Liverpool Rathbone family, and Anna Barbara Rathbone, née George, a violinist of Irish origin. He had two older half-brothers, Harold and Horace, and two younger siblings, Beatrice and John. A great-grandson of the Victorian philanthropist William Rathbone V, Rathbone left South Africa at age three when his father was accused by the Boers of espionage following the Jameson Raid, and the family relocated to Britain. He attended Repton School in Derbyshire from 1906 to 1910, where he was known to classmates as "Ratters" and distinguished himself in sports. He briefly worked as an insurance clerk afterward, a concession to his father's preference for a conventional career.

Rathbone made his stage debut on 22 April 1911, at the Theatre Royal in Ipswich, playing Hortensio in The Taming of the Shrew with his cousin Sir Frank Benson's No. 2 Company under the direction of Henry Herbert. In October 1912, he traveled to the United States with Benson's company, taking on roles including Paris in Romeo and Juliet, Fenton in The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Silvius in As You Like It. He made his first London appearance on 9 July 1914, at the Savoy Theatre, playing Finch in The Sin of David, and that December appeared at the Shaftesbury Theatre as the Dauphin in Henry V.

During the First World War, Rathbone entered the British Army as a private with the London Scottish Regiment through the Derby Scheme in 1915. After early training, he was commissioned as a lieutenant in the 2/10th Battalion of the King's Liverpool Regiment, serving as an intelligence officer and eventually reaching the rank of captain. A two-time British Army Fencing Champion, he later used that skill professionally and taught swordsmanship to actors Errol Flynn and Tyrone Power. The death of his younger brother John, a captain in the Dorsetshire Regiment killed near Arras on 4 June 1918, profoundly affected Rathbone. He subsequently volunteered for daylight reconnaissance missions against enemy positions, wearing a camouflage suit designed to resemble a tree and using burnt cork on his hands and face. For those missions in September 1918, he was awarded the Military Cross for conspicuous daring and resource on patrol.

Following the war, Rathbone appeared at Stratford-upon-Avon during the Summer Festival of 1919 with the New Shakespeare Company, playing Romeo, Cassius, Ferdinand in The Tempest, and Florizel in The Winter's Tale. In February 1920, he took the title role in Peter Ibbetson at London's Savoy Theatre. Throughout the 1920s he continued performing in Shakespearean and other productions on the British stage, and in October 1923 appeared at the Cort Theatre in New York in a production of Molnár's The Swan opposite Eva Le Gallienne, a role that established him as a Broadway star. He toured the United States in 1925, appearing in San Francisco in May and at the Lyceum Theatre in New York in October, and returned again in 1927, 1930, and 1931, the last visit including a stage appearance with Ethel Barrymore. Later in his career he appeared with Katharine Cornell in several productions following his return to the United States in late 1934.

Rathbone's Broadway career spanned 1922 to 1958 and encompassed a wide range of productions. He starred in Jane, The Command to Love, and The Captive, and also appeared in Judas, Hide and Seek, and Sherlock Holmes, among other productions. In 1926, he was arrested along with the entire cast of The Captive, a play in which his character's wife left him for another woman; the charges were eventually dropped. In 1948, Rathbone shared the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play with two other performers, a recognition that marked the peak of his stage achievements in the United States. He also served as a book writer for Broadway, adding another dimension to his theatrical contributions.

Rathbone commenced his film career in Hollywood in 1921 with silent pictures, including The School for Scandal in 1923 and The Masked Bride. His sound debut came in the 1929 adaptation of The Last of Mrs. Cheyney opposite Norma Shearer. Through the 1930s he built a reputation playing suave villains and morally complex characters in costume dramas and swashbucklers, among them Mr. Murdstone in David Copperfield (1935), Karenin in Anna Karenina (1935), Pontius Pilate in The Last Days of Pompeii (1935), the Marquis St. Evremonde in A Tale of Two Cities (1935), Sir Guy of Gisbourne in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), and Captain Esteban Pasquale in The Mark of Zorro (1940). He also appeared in early horror films, portraying Richard III in Tower of London (1939) and Baron Wolf von Frankenstein in Son of Frankenstein (1939), and in 1949 served as narrator for the Wind in the Willows segment of the Disney animated feature The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad. Rathbone received two Academy Award nominations over the course of his film career and was honored with three stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

His most enduring screen identity was that of Sherlock Holmes, a role he played in fourteen Hollywood films produced between 1939 and 1946 and in an accompanying radio series. Rathbone died on 21 July 1967, having left a body of work that extended across more than seventy films, decades of stage performance on both sides of the Atlantic, and a Broadway career that earned him the theater's highest acting honor.