Cedric Hardwicke

Sir Cedric Webster Hardwicke (19 February 1893 – 6 August 1964) was an English stage and film actor born in Lye, Worcestershire, whose career extended across more than five decades. The son of Edwin Webster Hardwicke and his wife Jessie, née Masterson, he attended Stourbridge Grammar School before transferring to Bridgnorth Grammar School in Shropshire in September 1907, remaining there until July 1911. Having initially intended to pursue medicine, he abandoned that path after failing the required examinations and instead trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

Hardwicke made his professional stage debut at the Lyceum Theatre, London, in 1912, stepping into the role of Brother John in Frederick Melville's melodrama The Monk and the Woman. That same year he worked as an understudy at Her Majesty's Theatre and appeared at the Garrick Theatre in Charles Klein's Find the Woman and Trust the People. In 1913 he joined Benson's Company and toured the provinces, South Africa, and Rhodesia. Before the outbreak of the First World War he had already appeared at the Old Vic, playing Malcolm in Macbeth, Tranio in The Taming of the Shrew, and the gravedigger in Hamlet, among other roles, and had toured with Miss Darragh in Laurence Irving's The Unwritten Law.

At the start of the First World War, Hardwicke enlisted and served with the London Scottish from 1914 to 1921 as an officer in the Judge Advocate's branch of the British Army in France. He was among the last members of the British Expeditionary Force to depart France, and according to the Daily Mirror of 1 January 1934, he was one of the officers who escorted the Unknown Warrior from France aboard HMS Verdun. Returning to the stage after the war, he joined the Birmingham Repertory Company in January 1922, taking on parts ranging from the young lover Faulkland in The Rivals to Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night.

Hardwicke became one of the leading interpreters of George Bernard Shaw's work in his generation, appearing in Caesar and Cleopatra, Pygmalion, The Apple Cart, Candida, Too True to Be Good, and Don Juan in Hell. Shaw himself remarked that Hardwicke was his fifth favourite actor, after the four Marx Brothers. His prominence in Shavian roles contributed to his being knighted in the 1934 New Year's Honours at the age of 41, making him at that time the youngest actor to receive the honour; Laurence Olivier subsequently took the record in 1947 when knighted at 40. In 1928, while appearing alongside Edith Day, Paul Robeson, and Alberta Hunter in the London production of Show Boat, Hardwicke married actress Helena Pickard. In December 1935 he was elected Rede Lecturer to Cambridge University for 1936, taking as his subject "The Drama Tomorrow."

Moving to the United States in the late 1930s initially for film work, Hardwicke continued to perform on stage in tours and in New York during the early 1940s. In 1944 he returned to Britain, reappearing on the London stage at the Westminster Theatre on 29 March 1945 as Richard Varwell in a revival of Eden and Adelaide Phillpotts' Yellow Sands, subsequently touring in the production on the continent. He returned to America late in 1945 and appeared with Ethel Barrymore in a revival of Shaw's Pygmalion. In 1946 he starred opposite Katharine Cornell as King Creon in her production of Jean Anouilh's adaptation of Antigone. In 1948 he joined the Old Vic Company at the New Theatre to play Sir Toby Belch, Doctor Faustus, and Gaev in The Cherry Orchard before relocating permanently to the United States.

Hardwicke's Broadway career spanned from 1936 to 1963 and encompassed productions including Shadow and Substance, The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse, Antigone, Don Juan in Hell, and Promise. In 1951–52 he appeared on Broadway in Shaw's Don Juan in Hell alongside Agnes Moorehead, Charles Boyer, and Charles Laughton. His performance as a Japanese diplomat in A Majority of One earned him a Tony Award nomination for Best Actor in a Play in 1959.

His film career began with a British production in 1931, and from the late 1930s onward he was in sustained demand in Hollywood. Among his notable screen roles were David Livingstone opposite Spencer Tracy's Henry Morton Stanley in Stanley and Livingstone (1939), the villainous Frollo in the Charles Laughton remake of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), and Ludwig von Frankenstein in The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942) alongside Lon Chaney Jr. and Bela Lugosi. Earlier credits included Les Misérables (1935) with Fredric March and Charles Laughton, the first three-strip Technicolor feature Becky Sharp (1935), and King Solomon's Mines (1937). Later films included The Keys of the Kingdom (1944), The Winslow Boy (1948), Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (1948) with James Stewart, King Arthur in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1949), Olivier's Richard III (1955), and Pharaoh Sethi in Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1956). In 1956 he also appeared in the second-season premiere of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, titled "Wet Saturday," portraying Mr. Princey, an aristocratic figure attempting to conceal a murder. On 6 March 1958 he guest-starred on The Ford Show starring Tennessee Ernie Ford, and from 1961 he co-starred with Gertrude Berg in the Four Star Television sitcom Mrs. G. Goes to College, later retitled The Gertrude Berg Show, which was cancelled after one season.

In radio, Hardwicke played Sherlock Holmes in a 1945 BBC Radio dramatisation of The Speckled Band, opposite Finlay Currie as Dr. Watson. He later took the title role in a revival of the Bulldog Drummond radio program on the Mutual Broadcasting System, which ran from 3 January 1954 to 28 March 1954. His son Edward Hardwicke later played Dr. Watson in the Granada television series.

Hardwicke married Helena Pickard in 1928; they divorced in 1948 and had one son, the actor Edward Hardwicke. His second marriage, to actress Mary Scott (1921–2009), lasted from 1950 to 1961 and produced a son, Michael. A lifelong heavy smoker, Hardwicke suffered from emphysema and died on 6 August 1964 in New York from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease at the age of 71. His body was returned to England, and following a memorial service he was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium, where his ashes were scattered. He left two volumes of memoirs: Let's Pretend: Recollections and Reflections of a Lucky Actor (1932) and A Victorian in Orbit: The Irreverent Memoirs, as told to James Brough (1961). A sculpture by Tim Tolkien, commissioned by the Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council and unveiled in November 2005, commemorates Hardwicke at Lye Cross, where he lived as a child; its illuminated cut-metal panels depict scenes from The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Things to Come, and The Ghost of Frankenstein.