Miles Mander - Film Career

Film Career

He achieved success as Sir Hugh Boycott in The First Born (1928) which he directed and acted in, and which was based on his own novel and play. He is better remembered for his character portrayals of oily villains, many of them English gentlemen or upper crust cads - such as Cardinal Richelieu in the musical film The Three Musketeers (1939), a spoof in which the Ritz Brothers played lackeys who substituted for the real Musketeers. In his Hollywood debut, he had portrayed King Louis XIII in the much more serious 1935 version of that same Alexandre Dumas, père classic. Other famous film credits included Wuthering Heights with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon, in which he played Mr. Lockwood, the new tenant at the Grange, who is told the story of Cathy and Heathcliff. In the 1933 English version of G.W. Pabst's Adventures of Don Quixote, he played the Duke who invites Don Quixote and Sancho Panza to his castle, and in the original To Be or Not to Be, he was one of the two British officers to whom Robert Stack first reveals his suspicions about the treacherous Professor Siletsky (Stanley Ridges).