1. George Zucco was a British character actor who appeared in plays and 96 films, mostly American-made, during a career spanning over two decades, from the 1920s to 1951.
11 Facts About George Zucco
1. 2.
George Desylla Zucco was born in Manchester, Lancashire, on 11 January 1886.
3.
George Zucco's father, George De Sylla Zucco, was a Greek merchant from Corfu who became a naturalised British subject in 1865.
4.
George Zucco returned to the UK and served as a lieutenant in the British Army's West Yorkshire Regiment during the First World War.
5.
George Zucco lost the use of two fingers when he was shot in the right arm in France.
6.
George Zucco became a leading stage actor of the 1920s, and made his film debut as Eugene Godefroy Cavaignac in The Dreyfus Case, a British film dramatising the Dreyfus Affair.
7.
George Zucco played Professor Moriarty in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, opposite Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Dr Watson.
8.
George Zucco earned a reputation as a bespectacled, nefarious character in films such as After the Thin Man, Fast Company, Arrest Bulldog Drummond, Charlie Chan in Honolulu, The Cat and the Canary, and My Favorite Blonde.
9.
George Zucco was reunited with Basil Rathbone in another Sherlock Holmes adventure, Sherlock Holmes in Washington, this time playing not Moriarty, but a Nazi spy.
10.
George Zucco suffered from stroke-induced dementia for the rest of his life, and he died on 27 May 1960 from pneumonia in a nursing facility in Hollywood, aged 74.
11.
Stella George Zucco died from natural causes on May 11,1999, aged 99, in Woodland Hills, California.