Gaunt British character actor Ernest Graham Thesiger was educated at
Marlborough College and had originally studied to become an artist at
the Slade. He made his first stage appearance in a production of Colonel
Smith in 1909. He continued on stage until the outbreak of WWI, when
he enlisted and was subsequently sent home wounded from the front.
He achieved a professional triumph as star of the stage farce A Little
Bit of Fluff, which opened in 1915 and ran for several years. In 1916
he made his film debut in The Real Thing at Last (1916), the first of
a handful of silent film appearances. In 1932, he made his talkie debut
in James Whale's adaptation J.B. Priestly’s “Benighted”,
The Old Dark House (1932), creating an indelible impression as Horace
Femm, the condescending lord of the forbidding dwelling of the title.
He returned to Britain to appear in Gaumont-British’s production
of The Ghoul
(1933) with Boris Karloff, then Whale once again requested Thesiger's
services in The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), wherein the actor had
the role of a lifetime as the mad scientist Dr Pretorius.
The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) would be Thesiger's last film in America
and he returned to Britain once again, and appeared in the Alexander
Korda’s adaptation of H.G. Wells The
Man Who Could Work Miracles (1936) and had a memorable role as the
sinister strangler in They
Drive by Night (1938). During the 1940s he appeared in minor roles
in the comedies My
Learned Friend (1943), Don't
Take It to Heart (1944) and The
Ghosts of Berkeley Square (1947). Subsequently he played a departed
eccentric in Laughter
in Paradise (1951) and the gaunt cotton mill kingpin in Ealing’s
The Man in the White
Suit (1951). He made his final film appearance in The Roman Spring
of Mrs. Stone (1961). Thesiger was made a Commander of the British Empire
in 1960 and passed away the following year.
