Seth Arnold

Seth Arnold (1885 – January 3, 1955) was a British-born American theater and film character actor whose Broadway career spanned from 1927 to 1950. Born in London, England to American parents, Arnold's father worked as a representative of the American Tobacco Company in the British capital. After the family relocated to the United States, Arnold joined the Castle Square Stock Company in Boston in 1901, beginning his theatrical career with a single line in a production of Quo Vadis that same year.

During World War I, Arnold interrupted his theatrical work to perform intelligence work for the government. In the years that followed, he transitioned into directing, staging productions in Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, and Jersey City before returning to performance in 1927. His return to acting brought him to New York City, where he appeared at the Cort Theatre in The Arabian Nightmare, playing a physician. He took on another physician role the following year in Quicksand (1928).

Throughout the 1930s, Arnold accumulated a substantial list of stage credits. He starred in Steel (1931) and appeared in Mourning Becomes Electra (1932). In 1933 he was seen in Pursuit of Happiness, Tommy, and Unto the Third, followed by Symphony and Ah, Wilderness! in 1935, in which he played the central role of Nat Miller in the road production. Lady Lucky came in 1936, and in 1937 he took on the role of Doremus Jessup in It Can't Happen Here, based on the novel by Sinclair Lewis. He starred alongside Helen Hayes in What Every Woman Knows in 1939, and the two would collaborate again in Harriet in 1943, a play about the life of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Between those productions, he appeared in Conflict, Conquest (1940), and Clash By Night (1941).

Arnold's Broadway work continued into the mid-1940s with Last Stop (1944), A Place of Our Own (1945), A Joy Forever (1945), I Like It Here (1946), and Years Ago (1946). In 1947, he departed Broadway to join the Hollywood film adaptation of Mourning Becomes Electra, though illness forced him out of the cast before the production was completed. He appeared in other films during this period, among them Lost Boundaries. Arnold returned to the Broadway stage in 1950 in Arms and the Girl.

A member of both Actors' Equity and the Screen Actors Guild, Arnold was married to a fellow actor who performed professionally under the name Laurie McVicker. He died on January 3, 1955, at his residence in the Marie Antoinette Hotel in New York City.