Biography
This page uses content from the Basil Rathbone biography page on the English version of Wikipedia and is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. This list of authors can be seen in the page history. Rotten Tomatoes disclaims any and all warranties as to the accuracy or reliability of the content.
Basil Rathbone (13 June, 1892 – 21 July, 1967) was an English actor most famous for his portrayal of Sherlock Holmes and swashbuckler film villain roles.
Early life
He was born Philip St. John Basil Rathbone in Johannesburg, South Africa, to English parents: Edgar Philip Rathbone and Anna Barbara George. A younger sister and brother, Beatrice and John, rounded out the family. The Rathbones fled to England when Basil was three years of age after his father was accused by the Boers of being a British spy near the onset of the Second Boer War. He was educated at Repton School and served in the Liverpool Scottish in the First World War.
Personal life
Rathbone married actress Marion Foreman (married 1914, divorced 1926) and was involved briefly with actress Eva Le Gallienne during his first marriage. His second marriage was to writer Ouida Bergere (married 1927, his death 1967).
He and Foreman had one son, Rodion Rathbone, while he and Bergere adopted a daughter, Cynthia Rathbone.
He died of a heart attack, aged 75, at his home in New York City. He is interred in the Ferncliff Cemetery, Hartsdale, New York.
Unlike some of his British actor contemporaries in Hollywood and New York, Rathbone never renounced his British citizenship.
Career
During the 1920s, Rathbone appeared in Shakespearean roles on the British stage. He was in a few silent movies, and played detective Philo Vance in the 1929 movie The Bishop Murder Case.
Rathbone became famous for playing suave villains in many swashbucklers of the 1930s, including David Copperfield (1935), Anna Karenina (1935), The Last Days of Pompeii (1935), Captain Blood (1935), A Tale of Two Cities (1935), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) Tower of London (1939), and The Mark of Zorro (1940). Allegedly, he was Margaret Mitchell's first choice to play Rhett Butler in the film version of her novel Gone With The Wind (although, when interviewed around the time of casting, she chose Groucho Marx).
He was admired for his athletic cinema swordsmanship, particularly in the duel on the beach in Captain Blood and as Sir Guy of Gisbourne in the long fight scene in The Adventures of Robin Hood. Other noteworthy sword fights appear in Tower of London; The Mark of Zorro and The Court Jester (1956). The latter sends up a scene in the former where Tyrone Power slices a candle in two and leaves it burning.
Basil Rathbone earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor in a Supporting Role for his performance of Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet (1936), and another nomination for Best Actor in a Supporting Role for his performance of King Louis XI in If I Were King (1938).
Basil Rathbone is most widely recognized for his starring roles in fourteen Sherlock Holmes movies. He also starred as Holmes with Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson in an old-time radio mystery series, The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939 - 1946), and did numerous other radio broadcasts.
It was in 1939 that Rathbone first starred as Sherlock Holmes, in The Hound of the Baskervilles. Unfortunately, the many sequels, e.g. The Spider Woman, typecast him (he gained the nickname 'Razzle Bathrobe') and he was unable to completely remove himself from the shadow of Holmes. The last Universal Holmes film was released in 1946, and Rathbone quit the radio series shortly thereafter (It continued with Nigel Bruce and other actors playing Holmes, such as Tom Conway). Yet in later years, he willingly made the association, as in a TV sketch with Milton Berle in the early 1950s, in which Rathbone donned the deerstalker cap and Inverness cape. Rathbone also tried bringing Holmes to the stage in a play written by his wife Ouida. Thomas Gomez (who had appeared in one of the Universal Holmes films) played Moriarty; Nigel Bruce was too ill to take the part of Dr. Watson, and it was played by Jack Raine. Bruce's absence depressed Rathbone, and Bruce died while the play was in rehearsals. The play ran three performances. In the 1950s, he excelled in two spoofs of his earlier swashbuckling villains in Casanova's Big Night (1954) opposite Bob Hope and The Court Jester (1956), with Danny Kaye, appeared frequently on TV game shows, and had a substantive role in John Ford's political drama The Last Hurrah.
Rathbone also acted on Broadway numerous times. In 1948, he won a Tony Award for Best Actor in Play for his performance of the unyielding Dr. Austin Sloper in the original production of The Heiress (played by Sir Ralph Richardson in the film version, which won Olivia de Havilland one of her two Oscars). He also received accolades for his performance in J.B., a modernization of the Biblical trials of Job.
Through the 1950s and 1960s, he continued to appear in several dignified anthology programs on television. To pay the bills, he unfortunately also had to take jobs in films of far lesser quality, such as Queen of Blood, Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (with the inevitable wisecrack from comic Harvey Lembeck, "That guy looks like Sherlock Holmes.") and Hillbillies in a Haunted House.
He is also known for his readings of the stories and poems of Edgar Allan Poe, which are collected together with readings by Vincent Price. Especially powerful and striking is his reading of Poe's "The Raven". (Price and Rathbone had appeared in Tower of London with co-star Boris Karloff.)
Basil Rathbone has three stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame; one for motion pictures at 6549 Hollywood Boulevard; one for radio at 6300 Hollywood Boulevard; and one for television at 6915 Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood.
External links
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