Jack Hawkins possessed a distinctive persona that seemed to remain
constant across a range of parts and genres. A child actor from the
age of thirteen, he made his film debut in 1930 in Basil
Dean's Birds of Prey. He appeared mainly in supporting roles in
the 1930s and early 1940s when his first love was still theatre, but
came into prominence in the post-war cinema as one of the stalwarts
of well-bred and stiffly backboned English middle-class manhood.
His role as the Captain in The
Cruel Sea (1953) called upon his qualities of decent concern and
moral decisiveness, while Mandy
(1952) offered him a sensitive and caring role as a teacher of deaf
children. During the 1950s he became the acceptable image of the British
police in, for example, Home
at Seven (1952), The
Long Arm (1956) and John Ford's Gideon's Day (1958), while simultaneously
playing lead roles, somewhat surprisingly, in such Hollywood epics as
Howard Hawks' Land of the Pharaohs (1955) and William Wyler's Ben-Hur
(1959). Always in demand, he continued to act, with dubbing, after an
operation for cancer of the larynx in 1966.
