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Esmond Knight
Life Time
4 May 1906 - 23 February 1987
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His full name is Esmond Pennington Knight. He was born on May 4, 1906 in East Sheen, County Surrey. His acting debut took place in 1925, and a year later he first appeared on the stage of London’s Old Vic Theatre. Being engaged mainly in classical repertoire roles, he also took part in several musicals held at the Drury Lane Theatre. Since 1931, the actor began working in films - he played the young Johann Strauss in Alfred Hitchcock's early film "Vienna Waltzes" (1933) and starred in several films
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His full name is Esmond Pennington Knight. He was born on May 4, 1906 in East Sheen, County Surrey. His acting debut took place in 1925, and a year later he first appeared on the stage of London’s Old Vic Theatre. Being engaged mainly in classical repertoire roles, he also took part in several musicals held at the Drury Lane Theatre. Since 1931, the actor began working in films - he played the young Johann Strauss in Alfred Hitchcock's early film "Vienna Waltzes" (1933) and starred in several films by Michael Powell, including his famous spy tape "Smuggling" (1940). During the war, Knight served in the Navy in the command of the ship "Prince of Wales" in the rank of junior officer. In the battle with the German battleship Bismarck in 1941, as a result of a serious wound, he was temporarily blind and was commissioned for health reasons. Gradually, his vision returned to him, but he never recovered completely - one eye of the actor remained blind forever. Nevertheless, Knight's acting career did not end there - he managed to find the strength to return to active activity and from the mid-forties continued to act in films and play in the theater. He has appeared in all three of Laurence Olivier's Shakespeare films - he was Captain Flewellen in Henry V (1944), Bernardo in Hamlet (1948) and Ratcliffe in Richard III (1955). He also reunited with Michael Powell, with whom he had a close friendship for many years, and starred in several of his most significant films, such as Canterbury Tales (1944), Black Narcissus, End of the River (both 1947), Red Shoes (1948) and Peeping (1960). Another important event in Knight's career was Jean Renoir's romantic drama The River (1951), where he played the father of a family living in colonial East Bengal. The film also starred Knight's wife - actress Nora Swinburne.
The theatrical repertoire of Knight, who played in the Old Vic with Laurence Olivier and the Royal Shakespeare Company, included plays by Terence Rattigan, Thomas Stearns Eliot, Bernard Shaw, Henrik Ibsen and, of course, William Shakespeare. In 1960, he had the opportunity to star in the military-historical film "Sink Bismarck!" directed by Lewis Gilbert, dedicated to the events in which Knight nineteen years before the release of the picture on the screen took a direct part, namely, the story of the destruction by the British Navy of the German battleship Bismarck - one of the most powerful battleships of the Third Reich. In this film, Esmond Knight was destined to play the captain of the same ship "Prince of Wales", on which he once served as a junior officer. The actor continued to act until the mid-eighties and died in February 1987 in Egypt while filming another film.
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