Frank Lawton

Frank Lawton Mokeley was an English actor born on 30 September 1904 in St Giles, London. He came from a theatrical family; both of his parents, Daisy May Collier and Frank Mokely Lawton, were stage players. He died on 10 June 1969 at his home in London at the age of 64.

Lawton built a career that spanned stage and screen on both sides of the Atlantic. His first significant film role came with Young Woodley in 1930, and by the mid-1930s he had moved to Hollywood, where his most prominent screen credit was the role of the adult David Copperfield in MGM's 1935 adaptation of the Dickens novel. A sustained breakthrough in Hollywood did not follow, and Lawton returned to British film and theatre.

His Broadway career ran from 1934 to 1938 and encompassed four productions: I Am My Youth, the play The Wind and the Rain, French Without Tears, and Promise. In the West End, his stage work continued into the 1950s, including appearances in Alex Atkinson's Four Winds in 1953 and Ronald Miller's Waiting for Gillian in 1954. In 1957 he appeared in Michael Clayton Hutton's Silver Wedding alongside his wife, actress Evelyn Laye, whom he had married in 1934. The two also worked together on the television series My Husband and I.

During World War II, Lawton served in the British Army's King's Royal Rifle Corps, attaining the rank of major. He was assigned as a liaison officer to the U.S. Army and was awarded the Legion of Merit, Degree of Legionnaire, in recognition of that service.