British actor who was one of the top British box-office attractions
as a romantic lead in the Gainsborough melodramas of the 1940s. Less
dangerous than Mason, in The
Man in Grey (1943) and Fanny
by Gaslight (1944) he played the chivalrous champion of damsels
placed in distress by Mason's aristocratic villainy. In Love
Story (1944), a contemporary melodrama, he played a gallant RAF
pilot threatened by blindness, while in the exotic Madonna
of the Seven Moons (1944) he was a gypsy brigand offering Phyllis
Calvert a romantic alternative to respectability with a rich Italian
banker.
Outside the Gainsborough
series, but still a romantic genre actor, he starred in Frank
Launder's Captain
Boycott (1947) and Basil Dearden's
Saraband for Dead
Lovers (1948), before moving to Hollywood in the 1950s for a series
of swashbuckling adventurer roles under contract to MGM: King Solomon's
Mines (1950), Scaramouche (1952), The Prisoner of Zenda (1952), Beau
Brummell (1954), Moonfleet (1955) and Bhowani Junction (1956). In realistic
vein, Sidney Gilliat cast him as
a predatory spiv in Waterloo
Road (1945) and Dearden exploited his moral ambiguity in The Secret
Partner (1961). His film career declined in the 1970s, and he later
worked mainly for American television.
