Raymond Massey

From The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia
Raymond Massey (1931)
Raymond Massey on the right (1931)

Raymond Massey (30 august 1896 - 29 july 1983) was an American actor, of Canadian origin, who played Sherlock Holmes in 1931 in the first talking version of The Speckled Band.

Raymond Massey was born in Toronto August 30, 1896 into a wealthy Canadian family. His father was one of the owners of the truck factory: Massey Ferguson. His older brother Vincent Massey was Governor of Canada from 1952 to 1959. Himself, after his studies in Toronto and Oxford, made ​​the two wars in the Canadian Army and became an American citizen after World War II. He was severely wounded on the French front in 1918.

He decided in 1922 to start an artistic career and began in theaters in London. He played in his first movie in 1927. He quickly became wellknown. He had a strong chracter so he was doomed to play haughty and severe roles, or, like Basil Rathbone, the roles of bad guys. Courtier felon in The Prisoner of Zenda in 1937, Nazi officer in Sabotage in 1942, it was mainly an unforgettable psychopathic killer in 1944 Arsenic and Old Lace, a role created for the stage by Boris Karloff. But more often he embodied ruthless prosecutors (in The Woman in the Window in 1945 and, more unusual, in A Matter of Life and Death where he was a prosecutor. the court of 'beyond) or big businessmen (as in The Fountainhead, with Gary Cooper 1949). Finally, a certain resemblance to Abraham Lincoln allowed him to embody twice, in 1940 Abe Lincoln in Illinois, which earned him an Oscar nomination, and in 1962 The Conquest of the West.

He married three times. With his second wife, Adrianne Allen, a famous English stage actress, he had two children, Anna Massey (Anna Massey was the wife of Jeremy Brett from 1958 to 1962, with whom she had a son, David Huggins) and Daniel Massey (Daniel Massey played the role of J. Neil Gibson in The Problem of Thor Bridge (1991) with Jeremy Brett, as well as Trelawney Hope in 1968 in The Second Stain with Peter Cushing. Their separation in 1939 is straight out of a piece of Noel Coward: following the divorce proceedings, she remarried with his lawyer and he married his lawyer.


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