Born into an upper-class family, Oxford-educated Price embarked upon
an acting career in 1937. After several seasons in Sir
John Gielgud's acting company, Price then earned his first starring
role in Powell and
Pressburger’s
A Canterbury
Tale (1944). He was often cast as the bnoble scoundrel, and after
a spell in Gainsborough melodrama’s he went on to land his most
famous role as the charmingly homicidal heir Louis Mazzinni in Ealing’s
black comedy Kind
Hearts and Coronets (1949).
A busy character actor, he appeared in a handful of comedy classics
during the late 1950s; notably the Boulting Brother’s Private's
Progress (1956) and I'm
All Right Jack (1959), The
Naked Truth (1957), and hooking up again with Kind Hearts…
director Robert Hamer’s for
School for Scoundrels
(1960). Price gained a whole new flock of fans for his appearances as
Jeeves in the BBC series The World of Wooster. By the 1970s, Price’s
career was in decline and he’d become a tax exile to stave off
bankruptcy. His characters were now often highly camp, and he was frequently
seen in Spanish director Jesus Franco’s terrible psychedelic interpretations
of the horror genre. This late foray into horror did bring Price work
from the more reputable Hammer studios but by this time their fortunes
were also in decline. There was one final memorable cameo as a London
theatre critic in Theatre
of Blood (1973) before his death 1973.
