20 Facts About Cedric Hardwicke

1.

Sir Cedric Webster Hardwicke was an English stage and film actor whose career spanned nearly 50 years.

2.

Cedric Hardwicke intended to train as a doctor but failed to pass the necessary examinations.

3.

Cedric Hardwicke turned to the theatre and trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

4.

Cedric Hardwicke enlisted at the outbreak of the First World War.

5.

Cedric Hardwicke served with the London Scottish from 1914 to 1921 as an officer in the Judge Advocate's branch of the British Army in France.

6.

Cedric Hardwicke was one of the last members of the British Expeditionary Force to leave France.

7.

Cedric Hardwicke made his first appearance on stage at the Lyceum Theatre, London in 1912 during the run of Frederick Melville's melodrama The Monk and the Woman, when he took over the part of Brother John.

8.

Cedric Hardwicke played many classical roles on stage, appearing at London's top theatres, making his name on the stage performing works by George Bernard Shaw, who said that Hardwicke was his fifth favourite actor after the four Marx Brothers.

9.

In December 1935, Cedric Hardwicke was elected Rede Lecturer to Cambridge University for 1936, he took as his subject "The Drama Tomorrow".

10.

In 1944, Cedric Hardwicke returned to Britain, again touring, and reappeared on the London stage, at the Westminster Theatre, on 29 March 1945, as Richard Varwell in a revival of Eden and Adelaide Phillpotts' comedy Yellow Sands, and subsequently toured in this on the continent.

11.

Cedric Hardwicke returned to America late in 1945 and appeared with Ethel Barrymore in December in a revival of Shaw's Pygmalion, and continued on the New York stage the following year.

12.

Cedric Hardwicke played David Livingstone opposite Spencer Tracy's Henry Morton Stanley in Stanley and Livingstone in 1939, and played the evil Frollo in the remake of The Hunchback of Notre Dame starring Charles Laughton the same year.

13.

Cedric Hardwicke starred as the unfortunate Ludwig von Frankenstein in The Ghost of Frankenstein alongside Lon Chaney Jr.

14.

Cedric Hardwicke appeared in a 1956 episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents titled Wet Saturday in which he portrayed Mr Princey, an aristocratic gentleman who tries to cover up a murder to avoid public scandal.

15.

In 1945, Cedric Hardwicke played Sherlock Holmes in a BBC Radio dramatisation of The Speckled Band, opposite Finlay Currie as Dr Watson.

16.

Cedric Hardwicke played the titular role in a short-lived revival of the Bulldog Drummond radio program on the Mutual Broadcasting System, which ran 3 January 1954 to 28 March 1954.

17.

Cedric Hardwicke's body was flown back to England; after a memorial service he was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium in north London, where his ashes were scattered.

18.

Cedric Hardwicke left two volumes of memoirs: Let's Pretend: Recollections and Reflections of a Lucky Actor, 1932 and A Victorian in Orbit: as told to James Brough, 1962.

19.

Cedric Hardwicke is commemorated by a sculpture by Tim Tolkien at Lye, commissioned by the Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council.

20.

Cedric Hardwicke has a motion pictures star and a television star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.