Robert Guy Newton (1 June 1905 – 25 March 1956) was an English actor. Along with Errol Flynn, Newton was one of the more popular actors among the male juvenile audience of the 1940s and early 1950s, especially with British boys.[2] Known for his hard-living lifestyle, he was cited as a role model by the actor Oliver Reed and the Who's drummer Keith Moon.[2]
Beginning his career in theatre in the 1920s, Newton appeared in numerous plays in the West End, including Bitter Sweet by Noël Coward. In 1939 he starred as Horatio in Hamlet at the Old Vic theatre opposite Laurence Olivier's Prince Hamlet. After serving in the Royal Navy during the Second World War, he had his major break on screen playing the lead in This Happy Breed (1944) and starring in Olivier's version of Henry V (1944). These appearances saw British exhibitors vote him the 10th most popular British film star of 1944.[3]
His acting career began at the age of 16 at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 1921. He appeared in many repertory shows until he went to Canada where he worked on a cattle ranch for a year.[8]
Newton enlisted in the Royal Navy and saw active service in the rank of an Able Seaman on board HMSBritomart, which fought as an escort ship on several Russian convoys. After two and a half years in the Royal Navy he was medically discharged in 1943.
Return to acting
On resuming his film career, Newton played the lead in This Happy Breed (1944), a role played on stage by Noël Coward. Directed by David Lean, it was a huge hit. So too was the Laurence Olivier version of Henry V (1944), in which Newton played Ancient Pistol. These appearances helped British exhibitors vote him the 10th most popular British film star of 1944.[3] During the war, he starred in the West End in No Orchids for Miss Blandish, which was a hit.[9]
Treasure Island's success prompted Newton to return to Hollywood. He was one of several British actors in Soldiers Three (1951), an Imperial adventure tale. He returned to Britain for Tom Brown's Schooldays (1951) to play Thomas Arnold, then was cast by 20th Century Fox as Javert in their version of Les Misérables (1952). In 1951, he was voted the sixth most popular British star in Britain.[10]
Fox asked him back for The Desert Rats (1953) opposite Richard Burton and James Mason, playing a drunken school teacher who discovers bravery during World War II. He was one of several names in an airplane disaster movie The High and the Mighty (1954).
Back in Britain, Newton was given the lead in The Beachcomber (1954), a remake of Vessels of Wrath, this time in the part originally played by Charles Laughton. He again played Long John Silver in an Australian-made film, Long John Silver (1954). It was shot at Pagewood Studios, Sydney and directed by Byron Haskin, who had directed Treasure Island.[11] The company went on to make a 26-episode 1955 TV series, The Adventures of Long John Silver, in which Newton also starred. Earlier in 1954, he quit the film Svengali for personal reasons to be replaced by Sir Donald Wolfit which left him open to a legal action while filming in Australia in 1954.
Newton married four times and had three children: Sally Newton (born 1930), Nicholas Newton (born 1950)[12] and Kim Newton (born 1953).
He was accused of kidnapping his son, Nicholas, when he took him to Hollywood in 1951,[13] the year his third marriage ended. After a court battle, Newton's elder son was placed in the custody of his aunt and uncle.[14]
He married his fourth wife, Vera Budnick, in June 1952. They had a son, Kim.[15]
Death
Newton suffered in the latter part of his life from chronic alcoholism and died on 25 March 1956 at age 50, following a heart attack in Beverly Hills, California.[16] His body was cremated, and there is a plaque in Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles in his memory. Years later, his son Nicholas scattered his ashes into the south coast of Cornwall in Mount's Bay, near Lamorna in Cornwall, where his father had spent his childhood.[17]
James Neville Mason was an English actor. He achieved considerable success in British cinema before becoming a star in Hollywood. He was the top box-office attraction in the UK in 1944 and 1945; his British films included The Seventh Veil (1945) and The Wicked Lady (1945). He starred in Odd Man Out (1947), the first recipient of the BAFTA Award for Best British Film.
Stewart Granger was an English film actor, mainly associated with heroic and romantic leading roles. He was a popular leading man from the 1940s to the early 1960s, rising to fame through his appearances in the Gainsborough melodramas.
Wardell Edwin Bond was an American film character actor who appeared in more than 200 films and starred in the NBC television series Wagon Train from 1957 to 1960. Among his best-remembered roles are Bert the cop in Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946) and Captain Clayton in John Ford's The Searchers (1956).
Michael Charles Gauntlet Wilding was an English stage, television, and film actor. He is best known for a series of films he made with Anna Neagle; he also made two films with Alfred Hitchcock, Under Capricorn (1949) and Stage Fright (1950); and he guest starred on Hitchcock's TV show in 1963. He was married four times, including to Elizabeth Taylor, with whom he had two sons.
John Edward Hawkins, CBE was an English actor who worked on stage and in film from the 1930s until the 1970s. One of the most popular British film stars of the 1950s, he was known for his portrayal of military men.
Georgette Lizette Withers, CBE, AO, known professionally as Googie Withers, was an English entertainer who was a dancer and actress with a lengthy career spanning some nine decades in theatre, film, and television. She was a well-known actress and star of British films during the Second World War and postwar years.
Cecil Parker was an English actor with a distinctively husky voice, who usually played supporting roles, often characters with a supercilious demeanour, in his 91 films made between 1928 and 1969.
Louis Charles Hayward was a Johannesburg-born, British-American actor.
John Howard Payne was an American film actor who is mainly remembered from film noir crime stories and 20th Century Fox musical films, and for his leading roles in Miracle on 34th Street and the NBC Western television series The Restless Gun.
Sam Katzman was an American film producer and director. Katzman produced low-budget genre films, including serials, which had disproportionately high returns for the studios and his financial backers.
Tom Tyler was an American actor known for his leading roles in low-budget Western films in the silent and sound eras, and for his portrayal of superhero Captain Marvel in the 1941 serial film The Adventures of Captain Marvel. Tyler also played Kharis in 1940's The Mummy's Hand, a popular Universal Studios monster film.
Nigel Patrick was an English actor and stage director born into a theatrical family.
David Farrar was an English stage and film actor.
Torin Herbert Erskine Thatcher was a British actor who was noted for his flashy portrayals of screen villains.
Blackbeard the Pirate is a 1952 Technicolor adventure film directed by Raoul Walsh and starring Robert Newton, Linda Darnell, William Bendix, Keith Andes, and Torin Thatcher. The film was made by RKO Radio Pictures and produced by Edmund Grainger from a screenplay by Alan Le May based on the story by DeVallon Scott.
Stanley Andrews was an American actor perhaps best known as the voice of Daddy Warbucks on the radio program Little Orphan Annie and later as "The Old Ranger", the first host of the syndicated western anthology television series, Death Valley Days.
Alan Brown Le May was an American novelist and screenplay writer.
Carl Harbaugh was an American film actor, screenwriter and director.
Frank Sidney Hagney was an Australian actor. He is known for his work on It's a Wonderful Life (1946), Ride Him, Cowboy (1932) and The Sea Beast (1926).
Ronald Alfred Shiner was a British stand-up comedian and comedy actor whose career encompassed film, West End theatre and music hall.
↑ "Actor's Family Trouble". Barrier Miner. Vol.LXIII, no.17, 381. New South Wales, Australia. 8 February 1951. p.9. Retrieved 30 August 2017– via National Library of Australia.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
