Harry Welchman

Harry Welchman (24 February 1886 – 3 January 1966) was an English star of musical theatre. He made several appearances in non-musical plays, but was remembered as, in the words of The Times, "perhaps the most popular musical comedy hero on the London stage in the years between the wars."

Welchman was primarily a stage performer, but he made nineteen films between 1915 and 1954, some of them musical and others straight drama.

Welchman was born at Barnstaple, Devon, the son of an Army colonel. He was educated at Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, where he was a sporting boy, playing, as he said, "all the games", including hockey at county level. On leaving school at the age of eighteen he joined a touring musical comedy company led by Ada Reeve. When he was twenty he was spotted while playing in Christmas pantomime by the impresario Robert Courtneidge, under whose management he became a well known juvenile lead in such West End hit shows as Tom Jones (1907) The Arcadians (1909) and Princess Caprice (1912). In 1915 he made his first film, in the title role of Mr. Lyndon at Liberty.

During the latter part of the First World War Welchman served in the Royal Artillery. After demobilisation he returned to the West End under the management of C B Cochran, appearing with Alice Delysia in Afgar (1919). In 1921 he went to Daly's Theatre where he had two substantial successes, Sybil, and The Lady of the Rose, which, as The Times put it, "contained a famous duet in which Welchman tried without success to storm the affections of the heroine, played by Miss Phyllis Dare."

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