Robert Flemyng

Robert Flemyng, born Benjamin Arthur Flemyng on 3 January 1912 in Liverpool, England, was a British actor whose stage career spanned from the early 1930s through the 1990s. The son of a physician, George Gilbert Flemyng, and his second wife Rowena Eleanor, née Jacques, he was educated at Haileybury and initially pursued medicine before abandoning that path for the theatre. He died on 22 May 1995.

Flemyng made his stage debut in June 1931 at the age of nineteen, playing Kenneth Raglan in Patrick Hamilton's Rope at the County Theatre, Truro. His first London appearance followed in October 1931 at the Westminster Theatre, where he walked on in The Anatomist. During 1932 he toured with Violet Vanbrugh's company and subsequently joined the Liverpool Repertory Company at the Liverpool Playhouse, where director William Armstrong — who also trained Robert Donat, Rex Harrison, Michael Redgrave, and Diana Wynyard — guided his development over three seasons. It was at the Playhouse that Flemyng met the actress Carmen Sugars, who became his wife.

His West End career began in earnest in 1935, when Raymond Massey and Gladys Cooper cast him in a leading role in the comedy Worse Things Happen at Sea at the St James's Theatre. Although reviews for the production were lukewarm, Flemyng personally received praise from the press. His first major success came the following year in Terence Rattigan's comedy French Without Tears, in which he played a role for eighteen months of the production's 1,025-performance run before handing over to Hubert Gregg.

Flemyng made his North American debut in November 1938, playing Tony Fox-Collier in the comedy Spring Meeting, which opened at His Majesty's Theatre in Montreal before transferring to the Morosco Theatre in New York in December of that year, where it ran until March 1939. He remained on Broadway to play Makepiece Lovell in No Time for Comedy, a production starring Laurence Olivier and Katharine Cornell, with a reviewer in The Stage noting that Flemyng "comes close to walking away with the show." His Broadway career, which extended from 1938 to 1957, also included The Cocktail Party, The Potting Shed, and Portrait of a Lady.

On the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, Flemyng left the Broadway cast of No Time for Comedy and returned to England to enlist. He volunteered for the Royal Army Service Corps, was commissioned, and rose to the rank of full colonel at thirty-three, making him one of the youngest in the British Army to hold that rank. He saw action in Eritrea and Italy, was awarded the Military Cross in 1941, was mentioned in despatches, and was appointed OBE for military service in 1945.

Following the war, Flemyng appeared in an ENSA tour of Rattigan's While the Sun Shines as Lord Harpenden, concluding at the Théâtre Marigny in Paris. In 1947 he returned to Broadway as part of a company led by John Gielgud, playing Algernon Moncrieff to Gielgud's John Worthing in The Importance of Being Earnest and Ben to his Valentine in Love for Love. That same Broadway company earned a Tony Award for Outstanding Foreign Company in 1948. Back in London, he appeared as Rowlie Bateson in Frank Vosper's People Like Us in July 1948 and as Philotas in Rattigan's Adventure Story in June 1949. In a revival of French Without Tears, he switched to the role of the Hon Alan Howard, the part Rex Harrison had originated.

Flemyng's work in T. S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party marked a significant turn toward more serious dramatic material. He played Edward Chamberlayne, the distraught husband, alongside Alec Guinness, first at the Edinburgh Festival and then in London and New York in 1949 and 1950. In the 1960s he returned to the production in the central role of Harcourt-Reilly during a US tour in 1965. In 1954 he appeared at the ANTA Playhouse on Broadway in an adaptation of Henry James's Portrait of a Lady, and in January 1957 he returned to Broadway to create the role of James Callifer in Graham Greene's The Potting Shed. That same year he made his first Hollywood film, appearing in Stanley Donen's Funny Face.

Throughout the 1950s Flemyng balanced light comedy with more demanding roles, including General Rupert Forster, a war criminal, in John Whiting's Marching Song in 1954, and a co-starring role with Katharine Cornell in Somerset Maugham's The Constant Wife during a 1952–53 US tour. In the 1960s he played Dr Sloper in The Heiress, toured Australia in Difference of Opinion, and took on classical roles including Shylock in The Merchant of Venice at the Playhouse in Newcastle in March 1969 and Sir Colenso Ridgeon in The Doctor's Dilemma at the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake in June 1969.

His later career continued to range widely. In 1973 he toured as Andrew Wyke in Sleuth, and in 1974 he toured South Africa as Sebastian Crutwell in Rattigan's In Praise of Love, subsequently repeating the role at the Theatre Royal, Windsor in 1975. In 1980 he played Sorin in The Seagull alongside Barbara Jefford as Arkadina. In addition to his stage work, Flemyng appeared in more than thirty films and was a prominent presence in British television, most notably in the series Compact during the 1960s, in which he appeared in more than one hundred episodes. He was also a devoted supporter of Everton FC.