David Niven began his Hollywood career as an extra after resigning
a commission with the Highland Light Infantry. His Sandhurst military
school training and inherited membership of the officer class equipped
him for many of the parts he was to play: charming, dapper and with
a dash of light-hearted sexual roguishness. Following his military discharge,
Niven had parts in a number of notable Hollywood films of the 1930s
including The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), Dodsworth (1936),
The Prisoner of Zenda (1937) and Niven’s first major success;
The Dawn Patrol (1938).
Signed to Goldwyn, he followed a supporting role in Wuthering Heights
(1939) with his first starring role in Raffles (1940), a remake of the
Ronald Colman original. Returning to the British army service during
World War II, he was given leave to appear in n Leslie
Howard's The
First of the Few (1942) and Carol
Reed's The
Way Ahead (1944). On his discharge as a colonel he played the poet-airman
caught between life and death in A
Matter of Life and Death (1946), one of his most effective roles.
He was consistently in demand on both sides of the Atlantic, an international
debonair Englishman. In Around the World in 80 Days (1956) Niven gave
one of his most memorable performances as studious 19th century adventurer
Phileas Fogg.
He won a Best Actor Oscar for his performance as the fraudulent major
in Delbert Mann's Separate Tables (1958). During the 1960’s he
appeared as a compassionate explosives expert in the blockbuster The
Guns of Navarone (1961), and the sophisticated thief Sir Charles
Litton opposite Peter Sellers in The Pink
Panther (1964). The 1970’s saw Niven appear in two very different
star-studded ensemble murder mysteries; the blackly comical Murder by
Death (1976) and Agatha Christie adaptation Death on the Nile (1978).
The Pink Panther series was mistakenly rekindled in the 1980’s
and Niven revived his role of Sir Charles Litton for his final film,
Curse of the Pink Panther (1983), in which Niven’s voice had to
be dubbed due to the effects of a neurological illness.
