John Stuart (actor)
John Stuart was a Scottish actor, and was a very popular leading man in British silent films in the 1920s. He successfully made the transition to talking pictures in the 1930s and his film career went on to span almost six decades. He appeared in 172 films, 123 stage plays, and 103 television plays and series.
Early life
John Croall – later John Stuart – was born in Edinburgh on 18 July 1898. He came from a wealthy family whose company John Croall & Sons, run by his grandfather, made chassis for luxury cars such as Rolls-Royce. When he was seven the family moved to London, living in a house in Hampstead. His parents separated the following year, and John lived with his mother and two brothers in St John's Wood. He attended Dunstable Grammar School as a boarder, and at thirteen moved to Eastbourne College: 'Scholastically I was pretty hopeless. I loved games, particularly rugger and fives'. An early ambition was to become a naval doctor, but he then decided to join the army. Initially rejected because he was under age, at nineteen he was accepted and joined the Black Watch regiment as a private. He was then posted as a Second Lieutenant in the 2nd Battalion of the Seaforth Highlanders, with which he saw active service in the Arras sector of the Western Front. He was invalided out with trench fever in September 1918, and hospitalised in London, being released on Armistice Day. Whilst waiting in Scotland to be demobilised he became the battalion’s entertainment officer, organising concert parties for charity.Breaking into films
After a brief spell working in the family firm’s London office, against his family’s wishes he decided to try a career as an actor, using the stage name John Stuart. Despite having no acting training, he made his stage debut as an extra in a 1919 production of The Trojan Women at the Old Vic theatre, then appeared as the juvenile lead in a six-month tour of The Chinese Puzzle. The film producer and director Walter West, who thought he had ‘a film face’, asked him to play a small role in his 1920 silent film Her Son, for which he was paid three guineas a day. The film was shot at Broadwest Company's studio in Walthamstow. This led to him being cast that year in two other films for West The Great Gay Road and The Lights of Home, after which he decided to concentrate on a film career. He was then cast as the famous Welsh violinist David Morgan, the lead role in Land of My Fathers. Having received good notices, he went on in 1922 to play the romantic lead in Sinister Street, A Sporting Double and If Four Walls Told, while 1923 found him appearing in This Freedom, The School for Scandal and The Loves of Mary, Queen of Scots. During a slump in the British film industry he returned to the stage, making his debut in the West End as Lord Bleane in Our Betters, Somerset Maugham's withering attack on contemporary society, which ran for 548 performances. During this period he worked in the film studios during the day and at the theatre in the evenings.A star of the silent screen
In 1924 he married Jeanne Lagrene, a young French woman from Amiens. During the 1920s he starred in 35 silent feature films most of which are now lost. Two of his better-known films from this period were Alfred Hitchcock's debut as a director The Pleasure Garden and Hindle Wakes, directed by Maurice Elvey from Stanley Houghton’s controversial play.He became especially popular among cinema-goers with three war films directed by Elvey: Mademoiselle from Armentieres and The Flight Commander in which he played opposite the American actress Estelle Brody, and Roses of Picardy, where his co-star was Lilian Hall-Davis. These films were widely praised, with the Daily Chronicle stating that 'John Stuart is easily the best leading man in British pictures.' His popularity was such that a fan club, named the John Stuart Friendship Club, was set up in 1927 and attracted a large number of members. But his fame came at a price, for he was frequently mobbed by female fans. When he opened the new Clapham Pavilion cinema, he had to be given police protection from cheering fans. After visiting the Film Artists Fair in Bloomsbury he was surrounded by two hundred screaming young women, who clasped him around the neck and seized his arms. 'My hat, handkerchief and tie were snatched away, my pockets ripped off and my coat torn, all apparently for souvenirs' he explained the next morning.'
The talkies
In 1929 he and Estelle Brody were reunited in Kitty, directed by Victor Saville – one of the first British 'talkies'. The film featured a synchronised music score with sound effects and sequences of dialogue, recorded in New York as sound recording equipment wasn't available in Britain. Unlike several silent stars he made an easy transition to talking pictures. Now divorced from his first wife, in 1928 he met Muriel Angelus on the set of Sailors Don't Care. In 1931 she was cast as his fiancée in the sound re-make of Hindle Wakes, and in 1933 they were married.In 1932 he played three contrasting roles: he had the lead as a detective in his second film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, the thriller Number Seventeen ; he was an aggressive and ambitious foreman in a steel works in Men of Steel, which also featured Franklin Dyall, Benita Hume and Heather Angel; and he starred as the soldier hero who succumbs to the charms of Brigitte Helm in L'Atlantide, directed by the eminent G. W. Pabst, who shot many scenes in the Sahara desert. In Bella Donna he impressed as Mary Ellis's idealistic and deluded husband, matched well with co-star Conrad Veidt. He also played in two films starring Gracie Fields: as her teacher in This Week of Grace, and as her fiancé in The Show Goes On.
Around this time he started to work more in the theatre. As well as such West End productions as Finished Abroad in 1934, and in 1935 Public Saviour No.1, Butterfly on the Wheel and The Limping Man, he toured with No Exit and What We All Want. In 1938 and 1939 he led a repertory company in two seasons at the Sunderland Empire. Meanwhile Muriel Angelus had been a success in the stage musical Balalaika in the West End, and was offered a Hollywood contract with Paramount Studios. The couple separated when she moved to America.
The second world war
At the outbreak of war he attempted to rejoin his old regiment, but was deemed unfit on account of his previous disease, trench fever. In spring 1940 he undertook another repertory season in Sunderland, this time at the King’s theatre. Back in films, he appeared in two low-budget comedy films with Arthur Lucan and Kitty McShane: Old Mother Riley in Society and Old Mother Riley's Ghosts, and starred with Wilfred Lawson and Betty Stockfeld in Hard Steel as a romantic poet and composer. He had smaller roles in propaganda films about the war, including Michael Balcon's Ships with Wings, a tribute to the Fleet Air Arm, starring Leslie Banks, Ann Todd and John Clements; the drama-documentary The Big Blockade, in which many stars played cameo parts; and Flying Fortress, about the arrival of American airmen in Britain. But substantial parts continued: he was convincing as the cynical newspaper editor married to Anne Crawford in the thriller Headline, and as the sympathetic husband of Phyllis Calvert in the Gainsborough melodrama Madonna of the Seven Moons. He continued working in the theatre throughout this time. Having been divorced from Muriel Angelus, in 1943 he married the actress Barbara Francis, who had been his leading lady at Sunderland. They had two sons, Jonathan and Stephen, both born during the war.Later work
His professionalism and reliability was such that throughout the 1950s he worked constantly, playing minor roles as middle-class professionals such as doctors, police inspectors, detectives, a bank manager, a coroner and a magistrate. He also appeared in three films for Hammer Studios, The Revenge of Frankenstein, Blood of the Vampire and The Mummy, and featured in two acclaimed comedies, The Naked Truth and Too Many Crooks.In the aftermath of television resuming after the war, he acted in Murder in the Cathedral, R.U.R., Ten Little Niggers, Time and the Conways, and The Railway Children. His many subsequent television roles included appearances in Billy Bunter of Greyfriars School, The Railway Children, the children's science-fiction series The Lost Planet, and the popular hospital drama Emergency Ward 10. Meanwhile in the cinema he played Captain Kerr of H.M.S Hood in Lewis Gilbert’s epic film Sink the Bismarck!, while in the theatre he was cast as Group Captain Wood in Terence Rattigan’s play Ross, the story of Lawrence of Arabia. In the 1960s he mainly worked in television, but the 1970s brought interesting film appearances in Young Winston and Superman. He died on 17 October 1979, his acting career having lasted almost sixty years.