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Erich von Stroheim was born Erich Oswald Stroheim in 1885, in Vienna, Austria, to Johanna (Bondy), from Prague, and Benno Stroheim, a hatter from Gleiwitz, Germany (now Gliwice, Poland). His family was Jewish.
After spending some time working in his father's hat factory, he emigrated to America around 1909. Working in various jobs he arrived in Hollywood in 1914 and got work in D.W. Griffiths' company as a bit player. America's entry into WW1 enabled him to play sadistic monocled German officers but these roles dried up when the war ended. He turned to writing and directing but his passion for unnecessary detail such as Austrian guards wearing correct and expensively acquired regulation underwear which was never seen in 'Foolish Wives' caused the budget to reach a reported $1 million. Although the film became a hit the final edit was given to others resulting in a third of his footage being cut. Irving Thalberg fired him from 'Merry Go Round' which was completed by Rupert Julien. He then started on 'Greed', which when completed was unreleasable being 42 reels with a running time of 7 hours. It was eventually cut down to 10 reels which still had a striking effect on audiences. 'The Wedding March' was so long that even in it's unfinished state it was released as two separate films in Europe. Gloria Swanson fired him from her production of 'Queen Kelly' when with no sign of the film nearing completion the costs had risen to twice the budget partly due to him re-shooting scenes that had already been passed by the Hays office. She then had to spend a further $200,000 putting the footage into releasable state. It was the end for him as a director, but he made a reasonable success as an actor in the talkies.- Director
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Otto Ludwig Preminger was born in Wiznitz, Bukovina, Austria-Hungary. His father was a prosecutor, and Otto originally intended to follow his father into a law career; however, he fell in love with the theater in his 20's and became one of the most imaginative stage producers and directors. He was only 24 when engaged by Max Reinhardt to take over his theatre where he produced all kids of plays. He directed his first film in 1931, and came to the US in 1936 to direct 'Libel' on the Broadway stage. He then moved to Hollywood where he signed with Fox becoming the first independent producer / director .He alternated between stage and film until the great success of Laura (1944) made him an A-list director in Hollyood.
For two decades after "Laura was released in 1944, Preminger ranked as one of the top directors in the world. His powers began to wane after Advise & Consent (1962), and by the end of the decade, he was considered washed-up. However, such was the potency of his craftsmanship that he continued to direct major motion pictures into the 1970s, with Rosebud (1975) getting scathing reviews. His last directorial effort was The Human Factor (1979), which won him respectful notices.
Otto Preminger died on April 23, 1986 in New York City from the effects of lung cancer and Alzheimer's disease. He was 80 years old.- Actor
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George Sanders was born of English parents in St. Petersburg, Russia. He worked in a Birmingham textile mill, in the tobacco business and as a writer in advertising. He entered show business in London as a chorus boy, going from there to cabaret, radio and theatrical understudy. His film debut, in 1936, was as Curly Randall in Find the Lady (1936). His U.S. debut, the same year, with Twentieth Century-Fox, was as Lord Everett Stacy in Lloyd's of London (1936). During the late 1930s and early 1940s he made a number of movies as Simon Templar--the Saint--and as Gay Lawrence, the Falcon. He played Nazis (Maj. Quive-Smith in Fritz Lang's Man Hunt (1941)), royalty (Charles II in Otto Preminger's Forever Amber (1947)), and biblical roles (Saran of Gaza in Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah (1949)). He won the 1950 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor as theatre critic Addison De Witt in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's All About Eve (1950). In 1957 he hosted a TV series, The George Sanders Mystery Theater (1957). He continued to play mostly villains and charming heels until his suicide in 1972.- Wonderfully talented German-born actor, capable of tremendous comedic and dramatic performances, usually as some type of pompous bureaucrat or similarly arrogant individual. Ruman was born on October 11, 1884, in Hamburg, Germany, and actually studied electrotechnology in college before making the switch to acting. He served with the Imperial German Forces in World War I before coming to the United States in 1924. He became friendly with playwright George S. Kaufman and critic Alexander Woollcott and was regularly appearing in high-quality stage productions on Broadway.
With the advent of talkies, he was kept very busy in the cinema and became a favorite of the Marx Brothers, appearing as stiff-shirted NYC opera owner Herman Gottlieb in the comedy classic A Night at the Opera (1935). He played a know-it-all surgeon crossing swords with Groucho Marx over what exactly was wrong with hypochondriac Margaret Dumont in A Day at the Races (1937). and a dual role in A Night in Casablanca (1946). With his German accent, he was also a regular in several WWII espionage thrillers, including Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939), They Came to Blow Up America (1943), and The Hitler Gang (1944), and gave a superb portrayal of the two-faced POW guard Schulz in the splendid Stalag 17 (1953). He was also popular with famed director Ernst Lubitsch, who cast Ruman in Ninotchka (1939), and To Be or Not to Be (1942). In all, he notched up over 100 feature film appearances as well as guest star spots on many TV shows.
Ruman suffered ill health for the final two decades of his life and passed away on February 14, 1967, from a heart attack. - Actor
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Tall, portly Viennese character actor Walter Slezak simultaneously pursued two different careers after his arrival in America in 1930: one, as a star of musical comedy on the stage, and another, as a portrayer of villains, impish rogues or pompous buffoons on screen.
Walter was born in May 1902 in Vienna, Austria, to a musical family, the son of Elisabeth (Wertheim) and famous opera star Leo Slezak. He had Czech, Austrian, and Jewish ancestry. Walter studied medicine but quickly lost interest. For a while, he held a position working in a bank. At the age of twenty, he was spotted in a beer garden by the Hungarian actor/director Mihaly Kertesz (Michael Curtiz) and persuaded to appear in his motion picture Sodom and Gomorrah (1922). Subsequently, the then rather lean Walter Slezak was signed by Ufa and became a matinee idol in German films of the 1920s. Always somewhat too fond of the culinary arts, Slezak over the years put on so much weight that, by the end of the decade, he was no longer considered bankable as a romantic star and became relegated to playing character roles instead.
In 1930, Slezak emigrated to the United States and instantly hit it off with public and critics alike in his Broadway debut with the musical comedy 'Meet My Sister' (1930-31). Though publicly modest about his vocal abilities, Slezak gained further plaudits for his role in the Oscar Hammerstein II production, 'Music in the Air' (1932-33), scored by Jerome Kern. By the 1950s, Slezak had become an established name on Broadway, star of shows like 'My 3 Angels' (1953-54), written by Sam and Bella Spewack and directed by José Ferrer; the hit comedy 'The Gazebo' (1958-59), in which he starred as Elliott Nash, opposite Jayne Meadows (filmed afterwards at MGM, with Glenn Ford and Debbie Reynolds in the lead roles); and his greatest success, as the likable curmudgeon Panisse in the musical production of Marcel Pagnol's 'Fanny', directed by Joshua Logan. For this role, he won the 1955 Tony Award as Best Actor in a Musical. 'Fanny' chalked up an impressive run of 888 performances between 1954 and 1956. In 1959, Slezak fulfilled his dream of emulating his father by singing the part of Zsupan in 'The Gypsy Baron' at the Metropolitan Opera.
In motion pictures, Walter Slezak's career took quite a different path. He started in films in 1942, and just two years later, walked away with most of the acting honours for Alfred Hitchcock's claustrophobic thriller Lifeboat (1944). In it, he gave a compelling performance as the callous, methodical Nazi captain, who gradually assumes command of the vessel containing the survivors of the passenger ship torpedoed and sunk by his U-boat. Film critic Bosley Crowther, who had already been impressed with Slezak's previous performance as a Nazi agent in Once Upon a Honeymoon (1942), commented "Nor is he an altogether repulsive or invidious type. As Walter Slezak plays him, he is tricky and sometimes brutal, yes, but he is practical, ingenious and basically courageous in his lonely resolve. Some of his careful deceptions would be regarded as smart and heroic if they came from an American in the same spot" (New York Times, Jan.13 1944). The perceived incongruity of the enemy being portrayed with any sympathy whatever, resulted in criticism from other quarters for both the film and its director.
After 'Lifeboat', the ebullient Slezak appeared in a variety of lavish and colourful costume spectaculars: as a flamboyant pirate in the Bob Hope comedy The Princess and the Pirate (1944); as the reprehensible governor Don Alvarado, wooing Maureen O'Hara in the swashbuckler The Spanish Main (1945); and as yet another Spaniard, the boorish Don Pedro Vargas, having similar designs on Judy Garland in the MGM musical The Pirate (1948). He was also memorably evil as Sinbad's treacherous barber Melik in Sinbad, the Sailor (1947), the corrupt gumshoe Arnett in Robert Wise's gangster melodrama Born to Kill (1947), and as the scheming medicine-show man in The Inspector General (1949), starring Danny Kaye. (1949). He was again integral to the plot of Come September (1961), as enterprising major domo to Rock Hudson who secretly runs his employer's luxury villa as a hotel for eleven months of the year. Bosley Crowther described his comic performance as 'perfect'. Slezak further parodied his bad guy image in 'The Clock King' on TV's Batman (1966), then mellowed into the part of sagacious book dealer Strossel in The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962) and the amiable Squire Trelawney in the 1972 version of 'Treasure Island'.
In his private life, Walter Slezak was known as an experienced pilot, a connoisseur of art, lover of chess and good books. His long career as one of the outstanding character players of his time ended with his retirement in 1980. Despondent over a series of debilitating medical problems, Slezak took his own life in April 1983.- Actor
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Conrad Veidt attended the Sophiengymnasium (secondary school) in the Schoeneberg district of Berlin, and graduated without a diploma in 1912, last in his class of 13. Conrad liked animals, theater, cinema, fast cars, pastries, thunderstorms, gardening, swimming and golfing. He disliked heights, flying, the number 17, wearing ties, pudding and interviews. A star of early German cinema, he became a sensation in 1920 with his role as the murderous somnambulist Cesare in Robert Wiene's masterpiece The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). Other prominent roles in German silent films included Different from the Others (1919) and Waxworks (1924). His third wife, Ilona (nicknamed Lily), was Jewish, although he himself wasn't. However, whenever he had to state his ethnic background on forms to get a job, he wrote: "Jude" (Jew). He and Lily fled Germany in 1933 after the rise to power of Adolf Hitler, and he became a British citizen in 1939. Universal Pictures head Carl Laemmle personally chose Veidt to play Dracula in a film to be directed by Paul Leni based on a successful New York stage play: "Dracula". Ultimately, Bela Lugosi got the role, and Tod Browning directed the film, Dracula (1931). In his last German film, F.P.1 Doesn't Answer (1932), Veidt sang a song called "Where the Lighthouse Shines Across the Bay." Although the record was considered a flop in 1933, the song became a hit almost 50 years later, when, in 1980, DJ Terry Wogan played it as a request on the Radio 2 breakfast show. That single playing generated numerous phone calls, and shortly thereafter the song appeared on a British compilation album called "Movie Star Memories" - a collection of songs from 1930s-era films compiled from EMI archives. The album was released by World Records Ltd., and is now out of print but can still be ordered online ("Where the Lighthouse Shines Across the Bay" is track 4 on side 2). Veidt appeared in Germany's first talking picture, Bride 68 (1929), and made only one color picture, The Thief of Bagdad (1940), filmed in England and Hollywood. His most famous role was as Gestapo Maj. Strasser in the classic Casablanca (1942); although he was not the star of the picture, he was the highest paid actor. He died while playing golf, and on the death certificate his name is misspelled as "Hanz Walter Conrad Veidt". Because he had been blacklisted in Nazi Germany, there was no official announcement there of his death. His ex-wife, Felicitas, and daughter Viola, in Switzerland, heard about it on the radio.- Actor
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Born Willy Eichberger in Vienna, Austria, he changed his name to the ethnically nondescript Carl Esmond and went on to become a well-regarded actor both here and in Europe, a career that sustained itself for nearly 50 years. He initially studied drama in Vienna at the State Academy of Dramatic Arts and started things off with the German film Kaiserwalzer (1933) [The Emperor's Waltz]. He had developed into a matinée idol in both Germany and Austria with such films as Die Liebe siegt (1934) [Love Conquers] by the time he moved to London. He started treading the marquee boards there in such plays as "Victoria Regina" with a repertoire that would include everything from Shakespeare to Shaw.
In the late 1930s Esmond made a strategic career move to the United States, where he briefly changed his name yet again to Charles Esmond before reverting back to Carl. He eventually became an American citizen. Over the years, the slick, mustachioed, well-groomed actor poured on the charm in a number of popular war-era films as both cultivated romancers and urbane villains, in addition to the nefarious Teutonic officers he customarily played. Making his debut with the classic The Prisoner of Zenda (1937), Esmond went on to appear opposite Errol Flynn in The Dawn Patrol (1938), Gary Cooper in both Sergeant York (1941) and The Story of Dr. Wassell (1944), Ray Milland in Ministry of Fear (1944), Susan Hayward in Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman (1947) and Gregory Peck in The World in His Arms (1952).
By the 1950s Carl was a steady fixture on television drama and portrayed Victor Lazlo in a 1955 presentation of "Casablanca." A guest star of such series as "77 Sunset Strip," "Maverick," "the Big Valley" and "McMillan and Wife," his last film was the very forgettable Agent for H.A.R.M. (1966). Sporadically seen after that, he retired following his appearance in the TV mini-movie My Wicked, Wicked Ways: The Legend of Errol Flynn (1985), a biopic of his 30s co-star Errol Flynn. Long wed to literary agent Ruth Taub, who predeceased him, he died of natural causes at 102 years.- Actor
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With his whitish blond crew-cut, slow, menacing drawl and Germanic manner, Van Eyck was destined to be typecast as stereotypically scowling, arrogant Nazi officers. This was ironic, because he was an avowed anti-fascist who had left Germany in 1931 -- two years before Adolf Hitler came to power. The son of an aristocratic Prussian land owner, his father had intended him to embark on a military career. Instead, Peter spent his education in Berlin, where he trained as a musician.
In 1937, Van Eyck arrived in New York via Havana, Cuba, and became acquainted with the composer Aaron Copland. This led to a collaboration, as well as solo efforts, as composer and lyricist on a variety of songs for revue and cabaret. He also moonlighted as a pianist in bars and nightclubs. Around this time, he also began to work as a stage manager and arranger for Irving Berlin. Not afraid to try any job that came along, he tried his hand at driving a truck, and this, somehow, led him to Hollywood where he became a protege of the director Billy Wilder. Wilder prompted him to appear in front of the camera. In 1943, Peter commenced his career in films, by this time, as a naturalized American citizen. For the remainder of the decade, he had little to do but act an assembly line of parts as German officers and Gestapo henchmen in films like Five Graves to Cairo (1943) and Address Unknown (1944).
After the war, Van Eyck returned to Germany, where he was ironically cast as an American officer in Hallo, Fräulein! (1949). He also appeared in the comedy Royal Children (1950) ,with Jenny Jugo), as yet another American. He gave one of his very best performances in the role of Bimba in Henri-Georges Clouzot's high octane thriller The Wages of Fear (1953). In this famous French classic, he played one of a group of daredevil truck drivers traversing an impenetrable South American jungle with a deadly load of nitroglycerin.
Down the track, he found other good roles: as the womanising Frenchman Fribert in Rosemary (1958); as a police inspector investigating a famous murder in Dr. Crippen lebt (1958),aka ('Dr.Crippen lives'); a starring role as Paul Decker, who attempts the perfect murder of his wife in The Snorkel (1958); and one of two industrialist brothers in Helmut Käutner''s The Rest Is Silence (1959).
During the 60's, Van Eyck appeared increasingly in international co-productions of variable quality. Having settled in Switzerland and maintaining a residence in Paris, he was ideally placed to alternate between French, English and German film roles. He made three potboilers about the master criminal Dr. Mabuse which were extremely popular in Germany. His best performances during this period were as the East German intelligence officer Mundt, who is the target of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965) and as Colonel General von Brock in the absorbing war drama The Bridge at Remagen (1969), which was also his last film.
Van Eyck died near Zurich in July,1969, of septicemia, just short of his 58th birthday.- His father was the Judge of Mayence (Mainz) and his mother, who was half-English, was a singing teacher. Since the family was Jewish, the teenage Ferdinand was sent to England to stay with his aunt Lee Hutchinson, a noted photographer and sculptress. His parents were briefly interned in Buchenwald, but his mother's English connections enabled them also to get to England before war broke out.
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Anton Diffring was a character actor who worked continuously in motion pictures due to his aristocratic face and cool, clipped diction, making him ideal for typecasting in British and later American motion pictures as Nazis and other vile, despicable characters. What was ironic about his typecasting as a Nazi is that Diffring, born in Koblenz, Germany, on October 20, 1916, fled Nazi Germany in 1939.
He was the son of Bertha (Diffring) and Solomon/Samuel Pollack, a Jewish shop owner. He was born into a family that boasted generations of actors, and studied drama in Berlin and Vienna. At the outbreak of World War II, he fled Germany and wound up in Canada, where he was interned as an enemy alien for the duration of the war. It was in Canada where he began his acting career after World War II, working primarily there and in the US before moving to Britain in 1950.
He became popular playing Nazis in the postwar period, as the British film industry turned out film after film about the war, which created a great demand for actors who could convincingly play Nazis, the nastier the better. Diffring could play nasty, and his career as a character actor soared. He was still going at it in the 1960s, when he began appearing in American and international co-productions as German soldiers from both WW I and WW II, including The Blue Max (1966), Counterpoint (1967) and that Turner Network Television staple, Where Eagles Dare (1968). He was still going at it in the 1970s and 1980s, as he continued a nearly 40-year-long acting career that was terminated only by his death.
He was a much better actor than most of his roles required. Diffring broadened his range as an actor with stage and television work, but the movies continually beckoned, as casting agents were hooked on him when it came to Nazi roles. It was that face that did it; it was both his blessing and his curse. He had the light hair, the piercing blue eyes and the chiseled face of the haughty aristocrat, the German Junker, but it was a face that could telegraph much in the few seconds that was the average shot of a motion picture. As a character actor, he got much done with less (time).
In François Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 (1966) he was cast in all likelihood as a counterpart to the Austrian actor Oskar Werner, so that Werner's own Teutonicness in the English setting wouldn't be as arch. He excelled as Werner's nemesis, as he could create a mood or signal an entire story line with just a look; dialog didn't matter (he likely would have been a superstar in silent films, when it was "the faces" that mattered).
Diffring tried to break out of those silken villain roles, moving to Rome in 1968, but producers turned to him again and again to fill their needs for a foreign heavy. He appeared as one of the most infamous Nazis of all, Adolf Hitler's hangman Reinhard Heydrich, in Operation Daybreak (1975), and as Hitler's foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop in the American mini-series The Winds of War (1983). It made him a good living and it made him known, even if it did not fulfill his artistic ambitions.
What made his career such a success in terms of its longevity and fecundity was that Diffring was an actor who was enjoyable to watch. From Jack Clayton's I Am a Camera (1955) to Terence Fisher's The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959), from Samuel Fuller's Tote Taube in der Beethovenstraße (1972) to Ken Russell's Valentino (1977), Diffring gave memorable performances, sandwiched in with all the Nazi heavies one career could possibly bear.
Anton Diffring died at his home in Chateauneuf-de-Grasse, France, on May 20, 1989. He was 72 years old.- Actor
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Francis L. Sullivan was born on 6 January 1903 in London, England, UK. He was an actor, known for Great Expectations (1946), Night and the City (1950) and Oliver Twist (1948). He was married to Frances Joan Perkins (designer). He died on 19 November 1956 in New York City, New York, USA.- With his clipped delivery, aristocratic if somewhat ominous manner and suave, urbane demeanour, Eric Portman was so good at playing German and/or Nazi officers that many believed he actually was German, or at least Austrian. The fact is that he was British to the core, having been born, raised and educated in Halifax, West Yorkshire, England. He began his acting career on the stage in 1923, specialising in works by William Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw. His film debut came in the Tod Slaughter melodrama Maria Marten, or the Murder in the Red Barn (1935) as, oddly enough, a Gypsy.
Portman became a favourite of renowned filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, leading to a role he is probably best remembered for - the determined Nazi commander of a German U-boat sunk off the coast of Canada in 49th Parallel (1941), who tries to lead his crew across Canada in order to get to the safety of the US, which was at the time not involved in the war. His versatility was obvious in a film he made the next year, One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942) as an RAF officer who finds himself stranded in Nazi-occupied Holland.
Portman kept busy over the next 25 years in a variety of roles, as villain and hero, in both thrillers and dramas. After making Deadfall (1968) he retired, apart from a few television projects over the next year or so. He died in 1969 of heart problems. - Actor
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James Mason was born in Huddersfield and had a film career spanning over 50 years during which he appeared in over 100 films in England and America but never won an Oscar. Whatever role he played, from the wounded Belfast gunman in Odd Man Out to Rommel in The Desert Fox, his creamy velvet voice gave him away. Like Charlie Chaplin James left the screen to spend his later life living in Switzerland. His first marriage had been to Pamela Kellino, a Yorkshire mill owner's daughter and his second to Australian actress Clarissa Kaye.- Born in Hokenstein near the Prussia/ Poland border his mother was German and his father a French doctor. He studied biology at Berlin University but gave it up for banking then despite family protests he turned to the stage at 23 doing walk on parts in theatre's around Europe .In 1937 he moved to England playing Prince Ernest in Victoria Regina at the Lyric Theatre in London. 1940 -45 he broadcast regularly on overseas propaganda service. Married actress Susan Shaw and had a small, farm in Devon.
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The grandnephew of South African pioneer and former president Paul Krüger, Otto Kruger trained for a musical career from childhood, but after enrolling in Columbia University he switched his career choice to acting. Making his Broadway debut in 1915, at 30, he shortly became a matinée idol of the day, specializing in sophisticated leading roles. He made his film debut in 1915 in The Runaway Wife (1915), but it was in the 1930s that Kruger's polished, urbane characterizations came into full swing. Although he occasionally played a hero, as in Corregidor (1943) he was often cast as the amoral villain or a charming but corrupt businessman (usually a banker), a task at which he excelled. Kruger was one of the industry's busiest character actors until a series of strokes brought about his retirement in the mid-1960s.- Actor
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A Presbyterian minister's son, softly-spoken, intellectual-looking Alexander Knox received his education from the University of Western Ontario where he studied English literature. An excellent elocutionist (a member of the university's Hesperian Club) he had his first fling with dramatic acting playing the lead in "Hamlet". His professional theatrical debut began on the Boston stage in 1929 while simultaneously earning an income as a journalist for the Boston Post. After just one year he went looking for better acting opportunities in England, specializing in 'serious' classical parts which required just the right measure of 'gravitas'. During another journalistic stint with the London Advertiser he made the acquaintance of noted stage director and producer Tyrone Guthrie who helped him to make a name for himself on the London stage at the Old Vic. As the decade progressed, Knox appeared opposite such theatrical icons as Ralph Richardson and Laurence Olivier (in "The King of Nowhere"), and in plays by James Bridie and George Bernard Shaw.
Movie work followed in 1938 with appearances in The Phantom Strikes (1938) and a bit part in The Four Feathers (1939). However, the outbreak of World War II prompted his return to America. In 1940, Knox got his big break on Broadway cast in the role of Friar Laurence in "Romeo and Juliet", written and staged by Olivier and starring Vivien Leigh as Juliet. A later leading role in "The Three Sisters" (1942-43) -- a turn-of-the-century drama set in Russia -- saw him as Baron Tuzenbach opposite Katharine Cornell and Judith Anderson. With a brace of good critical notices, it became only a matter of time before the screen beckoned again. In 1941, Knox made his Hollywood film bow and was perfectly cast as the quiet intellectual Humphrey Van Weyden, protagonist of Jack London's maritime classic The Sea Wolf (1941). His performance was somewhat overshadowed by those of his co-stars, Edward G. Robinson (in the titular role of Wolf Larsen) and the dynamic John Garfield (as chief mutineer George Leech) but it led to further work as a reliable lead character player.
For most of his career, Knox tended to be typecast as men of integrity (though he did play the odd villain): stern authority figures, psychiatrists, academics and politicians - undoubtedly, this was because of his inherently sincere, though rather sombre on-screen personality. It was also a consequence of having been cast in the starring role of Woodrow Wilson, the 28th U.S. President, in Darryl F. Zanuck's over-ambitious biopic Wilson (1944). Bosley Crowther commented for The New York Times (August 2, 1944): "Much of the film's quality is due to the performance of Alexander Knox in the title role. Mr. Knox....draws a character that is full of inner strength - honest, forceful and intelligent, yet marked by a fine reserve... The casting of Mr. Knox, a comparative unknown, in this role was truly inspired". Despite the excellent personal notices, 'Wilson' was a rather slow and ponderous affair, a flop at the box office and one of Zanuck's most conspicuous failures. His personal reputation intact, Knox had several leading roles come his way in the wake of 'Wilson', even a rare comedy part in The Judge Steps Out (1948) as a starchy, but likeable Boston judge. However, in 1952, his career suffered a serious setback when he was blacklisted by HUAC for alleged left-wing affinities and forced to leave for England.
From 1954, Alexander Knox appeared in scores of British films and was particularly good in two productions for the director Joseph Losey (who had also been black-listed in Hollywood): The Damned (1962) and Accident (1967). He also played another U.S. president in the James Bond thriller You Only Live Twice (1967) and was a memorable spook (the ill-fated 'Control') in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979) on television. He made a successful return to the London stage, frequently in plays by Henrik Ibsen and Clifford Odets. Outside of his principal occupation he was finally able to devote himself wholeheartedly to his long-standing literary ambition, as the author of plays ("Old Master", "Trafalgar Square"), screenplays and five adventure novels set in the wilds of 19th century Canada. Knox died in his adopted home in Berwick-Upon-Tweed, England, in 1995 at the age of 88.