|
Kenneth More
Life Time
20 September 1914 - 12 July 1982
|
An English actor whose fame came in the fifties, Kenneth Gilbert More was born on September 20, 1914 in Gerrard Cross in Buckinghamshire. He graduated from Victoria College in Jersey. Coming from the middle class, More changed many different professions before becoming an actor, from a hunter-trapper in Canada to a civil engineer. He ended up at the Windmill Theatre in London, where he began acting as an amateur actor in cheap revues in 1935. He later moved to the professional stage. During World
more
An English actor whose fame came in the fifties, Kenneth Gilbert More was born on September 20, 1914 in Gerrard Cross in Buckinghamshire. He graduated from Victoria College in Jersey. Coming from the middle class, More changed many different professions before becoming an actor, from a hunter-trapper in Canada to a civil engineer. He ended up at the Windmill Theatre in London, where he began acting as an amateur actor in cheap revues in 1935. He later moved to the professional stage. During World War II, from 1939 to 1945, More served as a lieutenant in the Navy. In the autumn of 1946, he again began to perform on the stage and soon gained a reputation as a leading actor, playing in the London West End and provincial repertory theaters.
In the cinema in the first postwar years, More was engaged mainly in supporting roles. This continued until he starred in the comedies Genevieve (1953, dir. Henry Cornelius) and Doctor in the House (1953, dir. Ralph Thomas), which were huge successes and made him a star of the British screen. He was equally good at both light comedic and serious dramatic roles. And yet, despite starring in a number of comedies, More, like many actors of his generation (such as Jack Hawkins or Trevor Howard), mostly personified the type of courageous and reserved British officer and gentleman. Such were his lieutenant Teddy Evans in Scott the Antarctic (1948, dir. Charles Friend), the brave, war-crippled aviator-as Douglas Bader in Reaching for the Sky (1956, dir. Lewis Gilbert), the second assistant captain in A Night That Will Be Remembered (1958, dir. Roy Ward Baker), Captain Scott in Northwest Frontier (1959, dir. John Lee Thompson) and Captain Shephard in Sink Bismarck! (1960, dir. Lewis Gilbert), the pilot of the Terryman's Warriorne's play, Freddie's best of that time. Brilliantly playing this role in the theater, the actor repeated his success, embodying it on the screen in the eponymous drama directed by Anatole Litvak. For this work in 1955, he was awarded the Venice Film Festival Award for Best Actor. However, with the onset of the sixties, his popularity began to fall rapidly - embodying the traditional values of British society, More did not fit well into the aesthetics of the new decade. In the future, the actor worked mainly in the theater and on television, appearing less and less on the screen. His most successful television project was the series based on John Galsworthy's novel The Forsyte Saga (1967), in which More played Jolyon Forsythe. He later starred in Guy Hamilton's large-scale military epic Battle for Britain, Richard Attenborough's satirical comedy Oh What a Beautiful War! (both 1969) and Ronald Nime's Christmas musical Scrooge (1970). The actor continued to play until the late seventies, until Parkinson's disease forced him to retire. He published three autobiographical books in his lifetime: Careless (1959), Easily Leaving the Stage (1965), and More or Less (1978). Kenneth More died in London on July 12, 1982.
© Ozon.ru