Basil Langton

Basil Cedric Langton (9 January 1912 – 29 May 2003) was an English actor, director and photographer, who made a career on both sides of the Atlantic. He was an authority on the plays of George Bernard Shaw and compiled an archive of more than 400,000 words of interviews with people who had known and worked with Shaw. He was also a teacher, working at colleges in New York and California.

Langton was born in Bristol, but spent his early years in Canada, where his family moved soon after his birth. His first experience of theatre was in Montreal, where, at the age of six, he was taken by his mother to see Sarah Bernhardt's farewell tour in Camille. During his youth in Canada he became attracted by silent films: "I learned courage from Pearl White, love from Rudolph Valentino, and laughter from CharlieChaplin". After leaving school he worked in a bank, but was inspired to become an actor by seeing Donald Wolfit's performance in The Barretts of Wimpole Street in 1932. He won a scholarship that enabled him to leave Canada and return to England to begin a stage career in 1934. He studied with Beatrice Straight at her school of dance-mime at Dartington Hall, Devon, and worked with Kurt Jooss. In 1935 he began learning classical acting at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre and the Old Vic.

Langton appeared in fifteen films between 1935 and 1949, including The Belles of St. Clements (1936), One Good Turn (1936), The Shadow of Mike Emerald (1936), Father Steps Out (1937), The Elder Brother (1937), Mr. Smith Carries On (1937) and Merry Comes to Town (1937). In Laurence Olivier's first Macbeth at the Old Vic, Langton "took the eye with an extremely subtle and suspicious little characterisation of Lennox in the murder scene"; he understudied the star in the title role. In 1936 he was cast as Dolabella in Theodore Komisarjevsky's staging of Antony and Cleopatra. In the same year he played Eliah opposite the exiled German star Elizabeth Bergner in the title role in J. M. Barrie's The Boy David. In 1938 he played the lead in the London premiere of Clifford Odets's Awake and Sing, and for Michel Saint-Denis he appeared in Mikhail Bulgakov's The White Guard with Michael Redgrave and Peggy Ashcroft in 1938. He played Sebastian to Ashcroft's Viola in Twelfth Night in the same season. At Stratford in 1940 Langton played Hamlet with what The Times called "a fine Italianate presence", and was praised for his "tight lipped and tortured passion" as Angelo in Measure for Measure.

...
Wikipedia