Ralph Lynn

Ralph Clifford Lynn (8 March 1882 – 8 August 1962) was an English actor who had a 60-year career, and is best remembered for playing comedy parts in the Aldwych farces first on stage and then in film.

He played such parts as a supporting actor for more than two decades until 1922, when he was cast in the lead of a new West End farce, Tons of Money, in which he achieved immediate stardom.

[2] He spent his first 14 years as an actor performing in the British provinces and in the United States; he appeared at the Colonial Theatre, New York, in May 1913, as Algy Slowman in a revival of The Purple Lady.

[3] He made his first appearance on the London stage at the Empire Theatre in October 1914, as Montague Mayfair in By Jingo, If We Do—!, a revue by Arthur Wimperis and Hartley Carrick with music by Herman Finck.

The Times commented: Mr Ralph Lynn achieves a great triumph in his triple character, and alike as himself, as a rough diamond from Mexico, and as a naughty curate, he is extremely amusing.

For their next production, It Pays to Advertise (1924) by Roi Cooper Megrue and Walter Hackett, the team of Walls, Hare and Lynn moved to the Aldwych Theatre.

At first he was wary about Lynn, thinking his "silly ass" persona unsuited to the conscientious and on the whole sensible character he was to play in the first of Travers's Aldwych farces.

In 1930 he made his first full-length film, Rookery Nook, an adaptation of the Aldwych farce of the same name, directed by Walls, with the same cast as the stage production.

Further filmed versions of the farces followed: Plunder (1931), Thark (1932), A Cuckoo in the Nest (1933)[9] Turkey Time (1933), A Cup of Kindness (1934) and Dirty Work (1934).

[1] After the Second World War, by which time Walls was dead, Lynn teamed up again with Robertson Hare for two more Travers farces, Outrageous Fortune (1947) and Wild Horses (1952), which were successful without being smash hits.