He had been badly wounded in 1941 while on active service on board HMS Prince of Wales when she fought the Bismarck at the Battle of the Denmark Strait, and remained totally blind for two years, though he later regained some sight in his right eye.

In 1917, Knight and his older brother, Robert, alleged that the writer Norman Douglas indecently assaulted them during a 1916 visit to the Natural History Museum in London.

He travelled to Germany to star in Black Roses (originally Schwarze Rosen, 1935), a film about a Finnish anti-communist.

After completing his Naval training, Knight was appointed, with the rank of Sub-lieutenant, RNVR, to the battleship HMS Prince of Wales.

[5] In 1941, the ship received orders to pursue the German battleship Bismarck and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen.

In the Battle of the Denmark Strait on 24 May 1941, Knight witnessed the sinking of HMS Hood before being blinded by shrapnel.

[13] During 1943, Knight received a series of treatments from Dr Vincent Nesfield designed to restore sight to his remaining eye.

He appeared briefly in another Powell and Pressburger film, playing the roles of the village idiot and the "Seven Sisters Soldier" in A Canterbury Tale (1944), also adding the voice-over reading of Chaucer.

[14] His major breakthrough back into the mainstream came when he was cast as Fluellen, the brave but eccentric Welsh officer in Laurence Olivier's version of Henry V (1944).

Knight continued to work with Olivier and with Powell and Pressburger, appearing in the former's Shakespearean films Hamlet (1948) and Richard III (1955).

[15] Knight was the subject of a This Is Your Life episode in 1957 when he was surprised by Eamonn Andrews at the King's Theatre in Hammersmith, London.

He starred as Professor Ernest Reinhart in the British science fiction television series A for Andromeda (1961), alongside Patricia Kneale and Peter Halliday.