Background
Cedric Hardwicke was born on 19 February 1895 in Stourbridge, United Kingdom.
Cedric Hardwicke was born on 19 February 1895 in Stourbridge, United Kingdom.
There is a note of lazy debauch in his Steyne in Becky Sharp (35, Rouben Mamoulian), and he appeared as David Garrick in Peg of Old Drury (35, Wilcox), as the Bishop in Les Misérables (35, Richard Boleslavskv) before making a last London stage appearance in Tovarich. After Things to Come (36, William Cameron Menzies), Tudor Rose (36, Robert Stevenson), Laburnum Grove (36, Carol Reed), and Allan Quatermain in King Solomon's Mines (37, Stevenson), Hardwieke crossed the Atlantic to become a Hollywood actor.
For a few years he played leads: Green Light (37, Frank Borzage); as the missionary in Stanley and Livingstone (39, Henry King); Dr. Arnold in Tom Browns Schooldays (39, Stevenson); On Borrowed Time (39, Harold S. Bucquet); The Hunchback of Notre Dame (39, William Dieterle); and Victory (40, John Cromwell). But RKO, his studio, loaned him out at random and his career
soon lost shape: The Invisible Man Returns (40, Joe May); Suspicion (41, Allred Hitchcock); Sundown (41, Henry Hathaway); and The Ghost of Frankenstein (41, Erie C. Kenton). In 1943, Hardwicke played a leading if forlorn part in organizing a war-effort movie contributed to by British artists working in America: Forever and a Day (Frank Lloyd, Hardwicke, et ah). Fox then cast him as the Nazi in The Moon Is Down (43, Irving Pichel) and for a few years he had better parts at that studio: The Lodger (44, John Brahm); as Henry Cabot Lodge in Wilson (44, Henry King); Wing and a Prayer (44, Hathaway); The Keys of the Kingdom (44, John M. Stahl); and Sentimental Journey (46, Walter Lang).
But after the war his parts oscillated wildly: in Britain, Beware of Pity (46, Maurice Elvey); Ralph in Nicholas Nickleby (47, Alberto Cavalcanti); The Winslow Boy (48, Anthony Asquith); and Now Barabbas (49, Gordon Parry). And in the United States, Tycoon (47, Richard Wallace); A Woman's Vengeance (48, Zoltán Korda); I Remember Mama (48, George Stevens); Rope (48, Hitchcock); A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (49, Tav Garnett), in which he sang “Busy Doing Nothing with Crosby and William Bendix; and The Desert Fox (51, Hathaway).
It must be said that Hardwicke was seldom less than absorbing in these films: in middle age he had acquired a sunken gravity like that of Rumpelstiltskin once his name has been discovered. But with the 1950s he made whatever was offered: The White Tower (50, Ted Tetzlaff); The Green Glove (52, Rudolph Maté); Botany Bay (53, Jolm Farrow); Salome (53, Dieterle); Bait (54. Hugo Haas); Helen of Troy (55, Robert Wise); the fascinating insight of Baby Face Nelson, which came only two years after his Edward IV in Richard 111 (55, Laurence Olivier); and The Vagabond King (56, Michael Curtiz). Thereafter he had tinv parts in epics and, in the year of his death, a fine cameo as the father in The Pumpkin Eater (64, Jack Clayton).
By today’s standards, it is a mystery that Hardwieke should have been knighted for his acting when only thirty-eight years old. By that date, 1934, he was successful, but hardly aristocratic. On the stage, he had played in Shaw, Eden Philpotts, and The Barretts of Wimpole Street; and on the screen he was in Dreyfus (31, Milton Rosiner); Rome Express (32. Walter Forde); Orders Is Orders (33, Forde); The Ghoul (33, T. Hayes Hunter); as Charles II opposite Anna Neagle’s Nell Gwynn (34, Herbert Wilcox); as the Rabbi in Jew Siiss (34, Lothar Mendes); and in The Lady Is Willing (34, Gilbert Miller). Less than a knight, Hardwieke was a poker-faced Malvolio—short, tending to baldness, and with a voice so deep it could have come from a ventriloquist.
Was there a mischievous anarchist behind that solemn face that made Hardwieke bear his title through a career of hapless disorder? Did he take special pleasure in the shabbv? Here is Don Siegel explaining why he wanted Hardwieke for the crooked doctor in Baby Face Nelson (57), arguably his best film: “Hardwieke, particularly in those days, was a terrible villain. He drank a great deal and was a great deal of fun and he looked like a sleazy doctor. The picture everybody has is of someone very prim and proper, but he was not at all that way.”