Raymond Massey (Actor)

Raymond Massey in The Prisoner of Zenda. (Photo: Ted Allan)

Veteran stage and film star in both England and the US, long associated with his performance as "Abe Lincoln in Illinois" (1940), written for Massey by playwright Robert Sherwood. Lanky and not conventionally handsome, with a long, saturnine face and full lips, Massey brought an intense, commanding presence to features and often played discomforting authority figures. Notable examples of this type of role include his nasty Chauvelin in "The Scarlet Pimpernel" (1935), his principled John Brown in "Santa Fe Trail" (1940), his stern prosecutor in the Heaven-set sequences of the imaginative Michael Powell-Emeric Pressburger fantasy, "A Matter of Life and Death" (1945), and his excellent work as James Dean's emotionally distant father in "East of Eden" 1955).

Massey also played many villains (witness his wonderful Black Michael in "The Prisoner of Zenda" 1937), though he was capable of handling the occasional relaxed and likable romantic lead, as he did in James Whale's superb "The Old Dark House" (1932). And, of course, late in life Massey became widely known to a new generation of audiences as the kindly Dr. Gillespie of TV's long-running "Dr. Kildare" series (1961-66). Father, by actor Adrianne Allen (to whom he was married from 1929 to 1939), of British actors Daniel and Anna Massey.