Leslie Banks, 1890-1952

Leslie Banks (center) with Peter Lorre (l.) and Nova Pilbeam (r.) in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)

Today marks the birth anniversary of British actor Leslie Banks, who was born on this day in 1890. Banks is one of those names you'll see in the cast of some really interesting 1930s and early 1940s movies, although you may not recognize the man. He's the father of the kidnapped child in the first Hitchcock version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, a role James Stewart would take 20 years later. There's also the bad guy in The Most Dangerous Game, or Uncle Joss (ie. the uncle of the Maureen O'Hara character) in another Hitchcock movie, Jamaica Inn. (I thought I'd done a longer post on that film.)

In other roles, you can find Banks in Fire Over England, playing Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, or Went the Day Well, an interesting movie about a hypothetical Nazi takeover of an English village in preparation for a Nazi invasion, done while the war was still on in 1942.