John Le Mesurier
Following the war, he returned to acting and made his film debut in 1948, starring in the second feature comedy short Death in the Hand, opposite Esme Percy and Ernest Jay.
Le Mesurier had a prolific film career, appearing mostly in comedies, usually in roles portraying figures of authority such as army officers, policemen and judges.
[14] In 1933 he decided to leave the legal profession, and in September he enrolled at the Fay Compton Studio of Dramatic Art; a fellow student was the actor Alec Guinness, with whom he became close friends.
[16] In July 1934, the studio staged their annual public revue in which both Le Mesurier and Guinness took part; among the judges for the event were John Gielgud, Leslie Henson, Alfred Hitchcock and Ivor Novello.
Le Mesurier then accepted an offer to appear with Alec Guinness in a John Gielgud production of Hamlet, which began in Streatham in the spring of 1935 and later toured the English provinces.
[23] In July 1935, Le Mesurier was hired by the Oldham repertory company, based at the Coliseum Theatre; his first appearance with them was in a version of the Wilson Collison play, Up in Mabel's Room; he was sacked after one week for missing a performance after oversleeping.
[31] From November to December 1939, Le Mesurier toured Britain in a production of Goodness, How Sad,[32] during which time he met the director's daughter, June Melville, whom he married in April 1940.
[34] In his time in repertory, Le Mesurier took on a variety of roles across several genres; his biographer Graham McCann observed that his range included "comedies and tragedies, thrillers and fantasies, tense courtroom dramas and frenzied farces, Shakespeare and Ibsen, Sheridan and Wilde, Molière and Shaw, Congreve and Coward.
[34] Le Mesurier undertook several roles on television in 1951, including that of Doctor Forrest in The Railway Children,[46] the blackmailer Eduardo Lucas in Sherlock Holmes: The Second Stain,[47] and Joseph in the nativity play A Time to be Born.
[55] After a long run of small roles in second features, his 1955 portrayal of the registrar in Roy Boulting's comedy Josephine and Men, "jerked him out of the rut", according to Philip Oakes.
[25] Following his appearance in Josephine and Men, John and Roy Boulting cast Le Mesurier as a psychiatrist in their 1956 Second World War film, Private's Progress.
[56] Later in 1956 Le Mesurier again appeared alongside Attenborough, with small roles in Jay Lewis's The Baby and the Battleship and Roy Boulting's Brothers in Law, the latter of which also featured Carmichael and Terry-Thomas.
[60] In 1958 he appeared in ten films, among them Roy Boulting's comedy Happy Is the Bride,[61] about which Dilys Powell wrote in The Sunday Times: "[M]y vote for the most entertaining contributions ... goes to the two fathers, John Le Mesurier and Cecil Parker".
[69] He provided the voice of Mr. Justice Byrne in a recording of excerpts from the transcript of R v Penguin Books Ltd.—the court case concerning the publication of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover—which also featured Michael Hordern and Maurice Denham.
Lambert, reviewing for The Sunday Times, wrote that Le Mesurier gave "precisely the air of confident incredulity which the learned gentleman exhibited in court".
[81] In 1968 Le Mesurier was offered a role in a new BBC situation comedy playing an upper-middle-class Sergeant Arthur Wilson in Dad's Army;[82] he was the second choice after Robert Dorning.
[89] Tise Vahimagi, writing for the British Film Institute's Screenonline, agreed, and commented that "it was the hesitant exchanges of one-upmanship between Le Mesurier's Wilson, a figure of delicate gentility, and Arthur Lowe's pompous, middle class platoon leader Captain Mainwaring, that added to its finest moments".
[97] Following the success of Dad's Army, Le Mesurier recorded the single "A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square" with "Hometown" on the reverse side (the latter with Arthur Lowe).
[98] In between his performances in Dad's Army, Le Mesurier acted in films, including the role of the prison governor opposite Noël Coward in the 1969 Peter Collinson-directed The Italian Job.
[109] Le Mesurier made a cameo appearance in Val Guest's 1972 sex comedy Au Pair Girls, and starred alongside Warren Mitchell and Dandy Nichols in Bob Kellett's The Alf Garnett Saga.
[113] In 1979 he portrayed Sir Gawain in Walt Disney's Unidentified Flying Oddball, directed by Russ Mayberry, and co-starring Dennis Dugan, Jim Dale and Kenneth More.
[117][118] Writing for The Observer, Robert Cushman thought that Le Mesurier played the role with "deeply grizzled torpor",[118] while Michael Billington, reviewing for The Guardian, saw him as a "grey, gentle wisp of a man, full of half-completed gestures and seraphic smiles".
In 1939, Le Mesurier accepted a role in the Robert Morley play Goodness, How Sad!, directed by June Melville—whose father Frederick owned several theatres, including the Lyceum, Prince's and Brixton.
[147] Despite this, Le Mesurier remained friends with Hancock, calling him "a comic of true genius, capable of great warmth and generosity, but a tormented and unhappy man".
[155] Le Mesurier's favoured pastime was visiting the jazz clubs around Soho, such as Ronnie Scott's, and he observed that "listening to artists like Bill Evans, Oscar Peterson or Alan Clare always made life seem that little bit brighter".
[161] Director Peter Cotes, writing in The Guardian, called him one of Britain's "most accomplished screen character actors",[39] while The Times obituarist observed that he "could lend distinction to the smallest part".
[162] The character he cumulatively created will be remembered when others more famous are forgotten, not just for the skill of his playing but because he somehow embodied a symbolic British reaction to the whirlpool of the modern world—endlessly perplexed by the dizzying and incoherent pattern of events, but doing his best to ensure that resentment never showed.
[2] Le Mesurier played a wide range of parts, and became known as "an indispensable figure in the gallery of second-rank players which were the glory of the British film industry in its more prolific days".
[14] He felt his characterisations owed "a lot to my customary expression of bewildered innocence"[3] and tried to stress for many of his roles that his parts were those of "a decent chap all at sea in a chaotic world not of his own making".
[89] Director Peter Cotes agreed, adding, "he had depths unrealised through the mechanical pieces in which he generally appeared";[39] while Philip Oakes considered that, "single-handed, he has made more films watchable, even absorbing, than anyone else around".
