Clifford McLaglen

Clifford Henrich McLaglen was a British actor born on 15 June 1892, with his birthplace recorded as either Stepney, London, or Cape Town, Cape Colony. He died on 9 September 1978 in Huddersfield, Yorkshire. Of Scottish, Irish, and Dutch ancestry, McLaglen was one of nine or ten children in a family that produced several actors, including his brother Victor McLaglen, who won the Academy Award for Best Actor for The Informer, directed by John Ford, and received a nomination for Best Supporting Actor for The Quiet Man. Other siblings included Leopold McLaglen, a wrestler and inventor of a form of jujutsu that he taught to armed forces and police across the British Empire and America; Lewis McLaglen, an actor and soldier; Cyril McLaglen, an actor and horseman; Arthur McLaglen, an actor, unarmed combat professional, and sculptor; Kenneth McLaglen, an actor and mineralogist; and a sister, Lily Marian McLaglen, known as Mrs. Lance Tweedy, who was an actress, singer, and pianist.

Their father was born in Cape Town, South Africa, where he served as a missionary for the Free Protestant Episcopal Church. He later came to London to study as Clerk in Orders and eventually became Titular Bishop of Claremont in Cape Town, though he set aside that role to dedicate himself to work with impoverished children and beggars in London. Lily McLaglen frequently assisted him in this work.

Before his performing career, Clifford McLaglen worked in a tin mine in Cornwall. He enlisted in 1914 and, like all his brothers except the youngest two, Cyril and Kenneth, served in the First World War. He later worked for Sanger's Circus, riding horses and performing rope tricks, and appeared in vaudeville alongside various brothers. During the Second World War, McLaglen served in Iceland as part of a detail guarding Sir Winston Churchill, an assignment from which he obtained a bulldog and polar bear badge. He also served in a film unit during that period.

McLaglen appeared in numerous silent films in Britain, France, and Germany. The director Cavalcanti made two prize-winning films in France with McLaglen: Rien Que Les Heures in 1926 and Yvette in 1928. In 1927 he appeared in Boadicea, riding Roman-style, a technique he had acquired through his army and circus experience. In 1929 he participated in what was reputedly the first German talkie, Land Without Women, made with Conrad Veidt. The film was set in Australia and featured camels and desert imagery, though it was shot entirely in a Berlin studio using a tank of water and an aeroplane propeller. That same year he filmed Die Schmugglerbraut von Sorrento in Majorca, bringing horses with him for the production. His stage work in the United States included a Broadway appearance in 1930 in Affairs of State, in which he performed alongside Florence Eldridge, the wife of Fredric March. A planned film project called Ropes of Sand did not come to fruition. His film work continued into the 1930s, with credits including The Bermondsey Kid in 1933, Late Extra in 1935, and The Marriage of Corbal in 1936.