Henry Daniell

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Henry Daniell (born March 5, 1894 in London , England , † October 31, 1963 in Santa Monica , California ) was a British actor who became famous primarily for his portrayals of film villains.

life and career

Henry Daniell began his acting career on the London theaters at the age of 18. He achieved first recognition as a performer in Shakespeare plays. In 1921 Daniell moved to America to play Clair de Lune on Broadway alongside Ethel and John Barrymore . By 1963 Daniell was to play a total of 16 plays on Broadway. With the onset of talkies at the end of the 1920s, he came to Hollywood to the film industry, previously only a theater actor. His first film was the romantic comedy The Awful Truth , where he played one of the few leading roles of his film career together with Ina Claire . Soon he was cast mainly as an elegant villain in supporting roles and achieved greater fame with these roles.

Probably his best-known role today, Daniell had in 1940 as Dr. Gorbitsch in Charlie Chaplin's anti-Nazi comedy The Great Dictator . His appearance as a cold-hearted and racist advisor to a dictator with fanatical ideologies was a parody of the German Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels . Also in 1940 he played the dangerous opponent of Errol Flynn in the adventure film The Lord of the Seven Seas , where his character is killed in a sword fight by Flynn at the end of the film. In the same year, he also played a ruthless editor-in-chief in George Cukor's 1940 comedy The Night Before the Wedding (1940) alongside Cary Grant and James Stewart . He also played supporting roles in three films in the Sherlock Holmes series with Basil Rathbone , including as Holmes' most dangerous opponent Professor Moriarty in The Woman in Green . In the literary film adaptation of Jane Eyre in 1943 Daniell was seen alongside Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine as the sadistic boarding school director Henry Brocklehurst, who punished his students with immeasurable severity. Daniell was also cast as a mad scientist in several horror films.

In some films, however, Daniell was given the opportunity to play more personable roles, including as Franz Liszt in the biopic Clara Schumanns Große Liebe (1948) and as lawyer Mayhew in the classic court film Witness to the Prosecution (1957). In the 1950s, in addition to his film work, Daniell also had regular guest roles on US television. However, his roles became smaller as he got older. Daniell last appeared in My Fair Lady alongside Audrey Hepburn as an ambassador, who only had three sentences to speak. On the day of shooting this scene, he died of a heart attack at the age of 69 . The rest of his appearance was deleted from the film. In total, Daniell had around 95 film and television appearances between 1929 and 1964. He was married to his wife Ann Knox until his death.

Henry Daniell's grave site is in the Woodlawn Memorial Cemetery (Mausoleum) in Santa Monica .

Filmography (selection)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.nytimes.com/movies/person/16850/Henry-Daniell/biography

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Daniell, Henry
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British actor
DATE OF BIRTH March 5, 1894
PLACE OF BIRTH London , England
DATE OF DEATH October 31, 1963
Place of death Santa Monica , California , USA