Gerald du Maurier

Sir Gerald Hubert Edward Busson du Maurier (26 March 1873 – 11 April 1934) was an English actor and manager.

He obtained his first engagement, a small part in Sydney Grundy's An Old Jew, by means of his father's friend John Hare, manager of the Garrick Theatre.

Barrie plays: as Ernest in The Admirable Crichton during 1902, and the dual role of George Darling and Captain Hook (instead of Seymour Hicks, who had refused the part) in Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up, at the Duke of York's Theatre, London, on 27 December 1904.

His nephews, his sister Sylvia Llewelyn Davies's sons, were the inspiration for Peter Pan and other boy characters of Barrie's fiction.

During later years he acted in cinema roles such as Lord Camber's Ladies (1932), a German doctor in I Was a Spy (1933), the emperor's valet in Catherine the Great (1934) and, soon before his final illness, Weissensee in the Michael Balcon version of Jew Süss (1934).

du Maurier caricatured by Spy for Vanity Fair , 1907.
Gerald du Maurier with his three daughters, Angela, Daphne and Jeanne (1913)
Cannon Hall, Hampstead , drawn by A.R. Quinton , 1911, the family home in London from 1916 and where du Maurier died.