Cedric Hardwicke

Trivia

• He died at the age of 71 in New York City. He was buried in London's Golders Green Crematorium.
• Hardwicke's son is the actor Edward Hardwicke, who became well-known for playing Dr. Watson on British television in the 1980s and 1990s.
• 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.
• Despite having 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), Hardwicke is now remembered chiefly for his role 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 for his portrayal of the Pharaoh Seti I in Cecil B. DeMille's 1956 film The Ten Commandments.
• He returned to America late in 1945 and appeared with Ethel Barrymore in December in a revival of Shaw's Pygmalion, and continued on the New York the following year.
• In 1944 he returned to England, again touring, and reappeared on the London stage, at the Westminster Theatre, on 29 March 1945, as Richard Varwell in a revival of Eden and Adelaide Phillpotts comedy Yellow Sands, and subsequently toured in this on the Continent.
• He continued his stage career touring and in New York.
• He played Dr. David Livingstone opposite Spencer Tracy's Henry Morton Stanley in the 1939 film classic, Stanley and Livingstone and was also memorable as Jehan Frollo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, with Charles Laughton as Quasimodo.
• In 1939 Hardwicke was in Hollywood for film work there.
• In December 1935, Cedric Hardwicke was elected Rede Lecturer to Cambridge University for 1936.

Quotes

• "When actors are talking, they are servants of the dramatist. It is what they can show the audience when they are not talking that reveals the fine actor."
• "Actors must practice restraint else think what might happen in a love scene."
• "By temperament, a young actor needs to be mercurial, if nothing else, able to shed misfortunes like a duck shedding water and to magnify a pinpoint of hope into a golden dawn."
• "The director's tricks are accomplished by converting plays into spectacles of love, landscape, and lust, and the actors into puppets. Unhappily, a lot of young actors and actresses are destroyed in the process. They are drilled to perfection in a single role, while the director tries to produce performances by direction alone. As a result, they may be ruined for anything beyond the single role."
• "Let one dim-witted schoolboy scrawl 'lousy' on his card, and the entire studio may be stampeded the following morning in an executive meeting to discuss slicing and revising the picture to shreds. On Hollywood's theory that the customer must know best, the schoolboy's 'lousy' is regarded as the last word in dramatic criticism."
• "The last refuge of optimism in a world of gloom."
• "England is my wife. America is my mistress. It is very good sometimes to get away from one's wife."
• "Actors and burglars work better at night."
• "I believe that God felt sorry for actors, so he created Hollywood to give them a place in the sun and a swimming pool. The price they had to pay was to surrender their talent."
• "I can't act. I have never acted. And I shall never act. What I can do is suspend my audience's power of judgement till I've finished."