Ernest Thesiger

Ernest Frederic Graham Thesiger was an English stage and film actor born on 15 January 1879 in London, who maintained an active career on both sides of the Atlantic until shortly before his death on 14 January 1961. The third of four children of Hon. Sir Edward Peirson Thesiger, KCB, Clerk Assistant to Parliament, and Georgina Mary, daughter of William Bruce Stopford Sackville of Drayton House, Thrapston, Northamptonshire, he was the grandson of the 1st Lord Chelmsford, the nephew of the 2nd Lord Chelmsford, and a first cousin once removed of the explorer and author Wilfred Thesiger. He attended Marlborough College and the Slade School of Art with the intention of becoming a painter before turning to drama, making his professional stage debut in a production of Colonel Smith in 1909. That same year he participated in the Men's League for Women's Suffrage mass rally.

Following the outbreak of World War I, Thesiger enlisted on 31 August 1914 into the 2nd Battalion of the 9th London Regiment, Queen Victoria's Rifles, as Rifleman No. 2546. After three months of training in England he was deployed to the Western Front with the regiment's 1st Battalion, and on 1 January 1915 he was wounded in the trenches and evacuated back to England. During his time in France he had begun buying and repairing historical embroidery alongside his brother-in-law William Ranken, and after a barn explosion damaged his hands, he developed small sewing kits for similarly injured soldiers to provide activity and pain relief. This initiative became The Disabled Soldiers' Embroidery Industry, based at 42 Ebury Street, London, for which Thesiger served as Honorary Secretary Cross-Stitch and secured commissions including an altar frontal for private use at Buckingham Palace. In 1917 he married Janette Mary Fernie Ranken, sister of his close friend and fellow Slade graduate William Bruce Ellis Ranken.

Thesiger moved in wide artistic, literary, and theatrical circles. He frequented the studio of John Singer Sargent, befriended Mrs. Patrick Campbell, and corresponded with Percy Grainger. George Bernard Shaw wrote the role of the Dauphin in Saint Joan specifically for him, and Thesiger appeared in Somerset Maugham's successful 1921 play The Circle at the Haymarket Theatre, alongside Fay Compton and Leon Quartermaine. His earliest major stage success had come with the farce A Little Bit of Fluff at the Criterion Theatre from 1915 to 1918, in which he played the comic hero Bertrand Tully more than 1,200 times. He reprised the role in the 1919 film version and again in a 1923 revival at the Ambassadors Theatre. In 1925 he appeared in drag in Noël Coward's On with the Dance, and later played the Dauphin in Shaw's Saint Joan. He published an autobiography, Practically True, in 1927, and a book on his needlework expertise, Adventures in Embroidery, around 1936. An unpublished memoir written near the end of his life is held in the Ernest Thesiger Collection at the University of Bristol Theatre Collection.

Thesiger made his film debut in 1916 in The Real Thing at Last, a spoof of Macbeth in which he performed a drag turn as one of the Witches. He later played the First Witch in a 1941 production of Macbeth directed by John Gielgud. A larger role in Alfred Hitchcock's silent film Number 13 in 1922 went unreleased due to lack of funding. His Hollywood career was launched when he met director James Whale during a Christmas production of The Merry Wives of Windsor in 1919, and Whale subsequently cast him as Horace Femm in The Old Dark House in 1932, a film that also starred Boris Karloff, Charles Laughton, Melvyn Douglas, Gloria Stuart, Raymond Massey, and Lillian Bond. The following year Thesiger appeared with Karloff again in the British film The Ghoul. When Whale directed Bride of Frankenstein in 1935, he insisted on casting Thesiger as Dr. Septimus Pretorius over the studio's preference for Claude Rains, and the role became the most celebrated of Thesiger's film career. Originally cast as the Luddite sculptor Theotocopolous in H. G. Wells's Things to Come in 1936, his performance was judged unsuitable by Wells and he was replaced by Cedric Hardwicke, though he was retained for the parallel Wells production The Man Who Could Work Miracles. Later film appearances included The Man in the White Suit in 1951 with Alec Guinness, the Golden Globe-winning The Robe in 1953 in which he portrayed the Emperor Tiberius, The Horse's Mouth in 1958 again with Guinness, Sons and Lovers in 1960, and The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone in 1961 with Vivien Leigh and Warren Beatty.

Thesiger's Broadway career spanned from 1932 to 1957 and included appearances in The Devil Passes, A Sleeping Clergyman, Madame Bovary, The Country Wife, and As You Like It. In the production of As You Like It he played Jacques opposite Katharine Hepburn's Rosalind, a run that became the longest-running Broadway production of that play. His final stage appearance took place in 1961, the same year he died, one day before his eighty-second birthday.