Alexander Knox was born on January 16, 1907 in Stratroy, Ontario, Canada, to a Presbyterian priest. In October of the same year, the Knox family moved to Pembroke, where they lived for a while before moving to permanent residence in the UK. In London, he attended high school and was already keenly interested in theater and literature - he was editor of the poetry department in the school newspaper and took part in amateur plays. When he was fourteen years old, Knox’s father died, and the family, experiencing financial difficulties, had to move from a private home to a boarding school to be able to pay for his further education. Throughout his studies, Knox continued to play on the amateur scene, trying to choose the most difficult roles. In 1929, shortly before finishing his final year, he left the university and became an actor in the repertory theater in Boston. However, an economic crisis, known as the Great Depression, soon broke out, and in 1930 he found himself again in London in search of work. During the nine years spent in the UK, Knox managed to work as a reporter for a London newspaper, become an actor at the Old Vic Theatre, star in small roles in several films, and write and stage the play The Old Master. He had the opportunity to play with many famous theater actors - Laurence Olivier, Charles Lawton, Ralph Richardson and Ernest Taziger. In addition, he was one of the first actors to start working for the newly opened BBC.
Because of the air raids, work in the theater was minimized and Knox returned home to Ontario. He continued to write newspaper articles, and in March 1940, along with Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier, appeared on stage in San Francisco in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. The following year, Warner Brothers signed him, and he soon played Humphrey van Weyden, his first notable film role in Michael Curtitz's The Sea Wolf (1941). Following the wartime dramas Commandos Attack at Dawn (1942, John Farrow) and This First (1942, dir.) Anatole Litvak, he starred in the biopic Wilson (1944, Henry King), as the twenty-eighth U.S. President Woodrow Wilson. Despite the fact that the film was not a commercial success, for this work Knox was awarded the Golden Globe Award and nominated for an Oscar.
This allowed him to play several leading roles in the films “Sister Kenny” (1946, Dudley Nichols), “The Sign of Aries” (1948, directed by John Sturges), in which he also acted as a screenwriter-co-author, as well as in the comedy “The Judge was absent” (1949, Boris Ingster). However, later he began to be used as a supporting actor, offering roles in frankly weak films. With the advent of McCarthyism and blacklists, Knox, like many then working in Hollywood, chose to leave the country and returned to the UK in the fall of 1952 with his wife, actress Doris Nolan. In the same year, he was paired with Ingrid Bergman in the psychological drama Europe 51 by Italian director Roberto Rossellini, sustained in the spirit of neorealism.
In the mid-fifties, Knox appeared in several passing British films, mainly spy and crime thrillers. One of the few exceptions was the painting Sleeping Tiger (1954), staged by Joseph Lowsey, then working in the UK. Subsequently, the actor starred in two more films of the director - the comedy "Modesty Blaze" (1966) and the famous psychological drama with Dirk Bogard "An Accident" (1967), in which Knox played the rector of the college. Among other films with his participation, the most famous are the large-scale historical films Vikings (1958, Richard Fleischer), Hartum (1966, Basil Dearden), Nicholas and Alexandra (1971, directed by Franklin James Sheffner), the satirical comedy How I Won the War (1967, directed by Richard Lester) and the western Chalaco (1968, directed by Edward Dmitrick). He also gained some fame as a writer - since the early seventies he has published several adventure novels, including "The Night of the White Bear" and "The Dream of Totem".
In 1980, after a long absence, Knox returned to Canada to promote the television miniseries "Tin Man, Tailor, Soldier, Spy". The following year he was awarded an honorary degree from the University of Western Ontario, his alma mater. A few years later, the actor starred in the comedy of Canadian director Ted Kotcheff “Joshua then and now” (1985), after which he finally retired. The last ten years of his life he spent with his wife in the small English town of Berwick-upon-Tweed in the county of Northumbereland, where he died on April 25, 1995.
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