Alan Napier - Early Life and Career

Early Life and Career

Napier was a cousin of Neville Chamberlain, Britain's prime minister from 1937 to 1940. He was stage-struck from childhood and after graduating from Clifton College, the tall 6 ft 6 in (1.98 m), booming-voiced Napier studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, then later was engaged by the Oxford Players, where he worked with such raw young talent as Sir John Gielgud and Robert Morley. He continued working with the cream of Britain's acting crop during his ten years (1929–1939) on the West End stage. He went to New York City in 1940 to co-star with Gladys George in Lady in Waiting. Though his film career had begun in England in the 1930s, he had very little success before the cameras until he arrived and joined the British community in Hollywood in 1941. There he spent time with such people as James Whale. He usually played dignified, sometimes WASPish roles of all sizes in such films as Cat People (1942), The Uninvited (1943), and House of Horrors (1946).

He made a brief appearance as an unnamed British tourist in Fiesta (1947), starring Esther Williams, though the characters of 'the Tourist' — as he was billed in the credits — and Maria Morales (as played by Williams) never meet on-screen.

In The Song of Bernadette, he played the ethically questionable psychiatrist who is hired to declare Bernadette mentally ill. He appeared in two Shakespeare films: the Orson Welles Macbeth, in which he played a priest that Welles added to the story, who spoke lines originally uttered by other characters, and MGM's Julius Caesar, in which he played Cicero. He also played the vicious Earl of Warwick in Joan of Arc. In 1949, he made an appearance on the short-lived television anthology series Your Show Time as Sherlock Holmes, in an adaptation of "The Adventure of the Speckled Band". In the 1950s he appeared on TV in four episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and guest starred on Dale Robertson's NBC western series, Tales of Wells Fargo.