Basil Rathbone - Personal Life

Personal Life

Rathbone married actress Ethel Marion Foreman in 1914. They had one son, Rodion Rathbone (1915–1996), who had a brief Hollywood career under the name John Rodion. The couple divorced in 1926. In 1927, he married writer Ouida Bergère; the couple adopted a daughter, Cynthia Rathbone (1939–1969). The American actor Jackson Rathbone is a distant relation (a third cousin, several times removed). Another distant relation was Henry Rathbone, the U.S. Army officer who, along with his fiancé, was Abraham Lincoln's guest in the Presidential box at Ford's Theater when Lincoln was assassinated.

During Rathbone's Hollywood career, Ouida Rathbone, who was also her husband's business manager, developed a reputation for hosting elaborate expensive parties in their home, with many prominent and influential people on the guest lists. This trend inspired a joke in The Ghost Breakers (1940), a movie in which Rathbone does not appear: During a tremendous thunderstorm in New York City, Bob Hope observes that "Basil Rathbone must be throwing a party". British actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell described Rathbone as "two profiles pasted together". As cited in the same autobiography, Mrs. Campbell would later refer to him as, "a folded umbrella taking elocution lessons."