Richard Haydn

Richard Haydn
Richard Haydn, 1945
Born	George Richard Haydon (1905-03-10)10 March 1905 Camberwell, London, England, UK
Died	25 April 1985(1985-04-25) (aged 80) Los Angeles, California, US
Cause of death	Heart attack
Occupation	Actor
Years active	1938–1985

Richard Haydn (10 March 1905 – 25 April 1985) was an English comic actor in radio, films and television. Some of his better known performances include Ball of Fire (1941) as Professor Oddley, No Time for Love (1943) as Roger, And Then There Were None (1945) as Thomas Rogers, The Emperor Waltz (1948), Alice in Wonderland (1951) as the Caterpillar, as Baron Popoff in The Merry Widow (1952), and The Sound of Music (1965) as Maximilian "Max" Detweiler.

George Richard Haydon was born on 10 March 1905 in London. After working as a music hall entertainer and overseer of a Jamaican banana plantation, he joined a touring British theatre troupe. He was known for playing eccentric characters, such as Edwin Carp (on a 1964 episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show), Claud Curdle (Mr. Music, 1950), Richard Rancyd (Miss Tatlock's Millions, 1948) and Stanley Stayle (Dear Wife, 1949). Much of his stage delivery was done in a deliberate over-nasalized and over-enunciated manner. While he was noted for his performance as the voice of the Caterpillar in the 1951 Disney animated adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, Haydn is probably best known to modern audiences for the small role of Herr Falkstein in the 1974 Mel Brooks classic comedy Young Frankenstein. Haydn was also memorable as the manservant Rogers in the 1945 adaptation of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None. He is also well remembered for his role as "Uncle" Max Detweiler in The Sound of Music.