He came from a wealthy family whose company John Croall & Sons, run by his grandfather, made chassis for luxury cars such as Rolls-Royce.

[5] Despite having no acting training, he made his stage debut as an extra in a 1919 production of The Trojan Women at the Old Vic theatre, then appeared as the juvenile lead in a six-month tour of The Chinese Puzzle.

Having received good notices, he went on in 1922 to play the romantic lead in Sinister Street, A Sporting Double and If Four Walls Told, while 1923 found him appearing in This Freedom, The School for Scandal and The Loves of Mary, Queen of Scots.

[8] During a slump in the British film industry he returned to the stage, making his debut in the West End as Lord Bleane in Our Betters, Somerset Maugham's withering attack on contemporary society, which ran for 548 performances.

[10] Two of his better-known films from this period were Hitchcock's debut as a director The Pleasure Garden (1925)[11] and Hindle Wakes (1927), directed by Maurice Elvey from Stanley Houghton’s controversial play.

He became especially popular among cinema-goers with three war films[13] directed by Elvey: Mademoiselle from Armentieres (1926) and The Flight Commander (1927) in which he played opposite the American actress Estelle Brody, and Roses of Picardy, where his co-star was Lilian Hall-Davis.

[15] After visiting the Film Artists Fair in Bloomsbury he was surrounded by two hundred screaming young women, who clasped him around the neck and seized his arms.

In 1932 he played three contrasting roles: he had the lead as a detective in his second film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, the thriller Number Seventeen;[19] he was an aggressive and ambitious foreman in a steel works in Men of Steel, which also featured Franklin Dyall, Benita Hume and Heather Angel; and he starred as the soldier hero who succumbs to the charms of Brigitte Helm in L'Atlantide (also known as 'The Mistress of Atlantis'), directed by the eminent G. W. Pabst, who shot many scenes in the Sahara desert.

As well as such West End productions as Finished Abroad in 1934 (Savoy), and in 1935 Public Saviour No.1 (Piccadilly), Butterfly on the Wheel (Playhouse) and The Limping Man (Saville), he toured with No Exit (1936) and What We All Want (1937).

He had smaller roles in propaganda films about the war, including Michael Balcon's Ships with Wings (1941), a tribute to the Fleet Air Arm, starring Leslie Banks, Ann Todd and John Clements; the drama-documentary The Big Blockade (1941), in which many stars played cameo parts; and Flying Fortress (1942), about the arrival of American airmen in Britain.

But substantial parts continued: he was convincing as the cynical newspaper editor married to Anne Crawford in the thriller Headline (1943), and as the sympathetic husband of Phyllis Calvert in the Gainsborough melodrama Madonna of the Seven Moons (1945).

He also appeared in three films for Hammer Studios, The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958), Blood of the Vampire (1958) and The Mummy, and featured in two acclaimed comedies, The Naked Truth (1957) and Too Many Crooks (1959).

(1960), while in the theatre he was cast as Group Captain Wood in Terence Rattigan’s play Ross (Haymarket and tour, 1960), the story of Lawrence of Arabia.