Film and TV Work
His first appearance in a British film was in 1931, and from the late 1930s he was in great demand in Hollywood. He played Dr. David Livingstone opposite Spencer Tracy's Henry Morton Stanley in the 1939 film Stanley and Livingstone and was also memorable that year as Frollo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, with Charles Laughton as Quasimodo. In 1940 he played Mr. Jones in a screen version of Conrad's Victory. (Frollo and Jones are among the few truly evil characters that Hardwicke played.) He also starred in The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942), as the unfortunate Ludwig von Frankenstein, along side Lon Chaney Jr. and Bela Lugosi.
Hardwicke played in such film classics as Les Misérables (1935), King Solomon's Mines (1937), The Keys of the Kingdom (1944), The Winslow Boy (1948) and Olivier's Richard III (1955). He was also featured as King Arthur in the comedy/musical, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1949), singing Busy Doing Nothing in a trio with Bing Crosby and William Bendix, and as the Pharaoh Seti I in Cecil B. DeMille's 1956 film The Ten Commandments.
He appeared in a 1956 episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents entitled Wet Saturday in which he portrayed Mr. Princey, an aristocratic gentleman who tries to cover up a murder to avoid public scandal. On 6 March 1958, he guest starred on NBC's country variety series, The Ford Show, Starring Tennessee Ernie Ford. In the 1961–1962 television season, Hardwicke starred as Professor Crayton in Gertrude Berg's sitcom Mrs. G. Goes to College, which ran for twenty-six weeks on CBS. The story line had Berg attending college as a 62-year-old widowed freshman studying under Hardwicke, with whom she had previously acted. Earlier, Hardwicke had guest starred on the Howard Duff and Ida Lupino CBS sitcom Mr. Adams and Eve. He starred in The Twilight Zone episode Uncle Simon that first aired 15 November 1963. His final acting role was in the series The Outer Limits in the episode "The Forms of Things Unknown".
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