Miles Malleson

William Miles Malleson was born on 25 May 1888 on Avondale Road in South Croydon, Surrey, England, the son of Edmund Taylor Malleson, a manufacturing chemist, and Myrrha Bithynia Frances Borrell. His mother was a descendant of the numismatist Henry Perigal Borrell and the inventor Francis Maceroni. His cousin Lucy Malleson pursued a long career as a mystery novelist, publishing primarily under the pen name Anthony Gilbert. Malleson was educated at Brighton College and Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he made his first stage appearance in November 1909, playing the slave Sosias in a production of Aristophanes' The Wasps at the New Theatre, Cambridge. During his undergraduate years he also caused a stir by successfully impersonating a politician and delivering a speech at a debating society dinner in place of an invited guest who had not appeared.

Malleson turned professional in November 1911, having studied acting at Herbert Beerbohm Tree's Academy of Dramatic Art, the institution later renamed the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. In September 1914 he enlisted in the Army and was posted to Malta, but was invalided home and discharged in January 1915. Later that year he met Clifford Allen, who drew him toward pacifism and socialism. Malleson joined the No-Conscription Fellowship and by June 1916 was writing publicly in support of conscientious objectors. He produced two anti-war plays during this period, "D" Company and Black 'Ell, the latter refused for performance in 1916 and not staged in the United Kingdom until nine years later. When both plays were published in book form in 1916, police seized copies from the printers, characterizing them as a deliberate calumny on the British soldier. Malleson was also a supporter of the Bolshevik revolution and a founding member of the socialist 1917 Club in Soho.

As a playwright, Malleson produced a substantial body of work across several decades. His children's play Paddly Pools, which carried a socialist message, was widely performed by British amateur dramatic groups following the First World War. In the 1920s he became director of the Arts Guild of the Independent Labour Party, through which he helped establish amateur dramatic companies across Britain and facilitated productions of plays by George Bernard Shaw, John Galsworthy, and Laurence Housman. His 1934 play Six Men of Dorset, written with Harvey Brooks and centered on the Tolpuddle Martyrs, was later taken up by local theatre groups under the guidance of the Left Book Club Theatre Guild. Among his other playwright credits are Youth, The Little White Thought, The Bet, Michael, The Artist, Conflict, Yours Unfaithfully, and The Glorious Days. He also translated and adapted three plays by Molière — Le Misanthrope, which he titled The Slave of Truth, Tartuffe, and The Imaginary Invalid — collected in the 1960 volume Molière: Three Plays.

Malleson's Broadway career brought him to New York in 1946, where he appeared as a performer and contributed as a book writer. His Broadway credits include The Fanatics, Youth, The Critic, Oedipus Rex, and King Henry IV, Part II. The Fanatics, originally written in 1924 as a comedy in three acts, was among the works that represented his dual role as both playwright and stage performer.

Alongside his theatrical work, Malleson built a prolific screen career, becoming particularly well known for his appearances in British comedy films from the 1930s through the 1960s. He is especially remembered for his role as the Sultan in The Thief of Bagdad (1940), a film on which he also served as screenwriter, as well as for playing a hearse driver and bus conductor in Dead of Night (1945), the poetically inclined hangman in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), and Dr. Chasuble in The Importance of Being Earnest (1952). He had also worked as a screenwriter on Nell Gwyn (1934). Toward the end of his career, Malleson appeared in cameo roles in several Hammer horror films, including a substantial part in The Brides of Dracula as a hypochondriac, fee-hungry local doctor. Sir John Gielgud noted that Malleson was splendid as Polonius in Hamlet, attesting to his capacity for classical performance.

In his later years, failing eyesight prevented Malleson from continuing to work. He did, however, write subtitles for a filmed Comédie Française production of Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, shown at the Academy Cinema in London in 1962, and in 1964 recorded audio performances of Jeeves Takes Charge and Indian Summer of an Uncle with Roger Livesey, Terry-Thomas, Rita Webb, Avril Angers, and Judith Furse for the Caedmon Audio record label. Malleson married three times: first to writer and aspiring actress Lady Constance Malleson in 1915, from whom he divorced in 1923; then to Joan Billson, whom he married in 1923 and divorced in 1940; and finally to Tatiana Lieven in 1946. He died on 15 March 1969 following surgery to remove cataracts and was cremated in a private ceremony. A memorial service held at St Martin-in-the-Fields included readings by Sybil Thorndike and Laurence Olivier.