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Jack Hawkins
| Biography |
Jack Hawkins possessed a distinctive persona that seemed to remain constant across a range of parts and genres. A child actor from the age of thirteen, he made his film debut in 1930 in Basil Dean's Birds of Prey. He appeared mainly in supporting roles in the 1930s and early 1940s when his first love was still theatre, but came into prominence in the post-war cinema as one of the stalwarts of well-bred and stiffly backboned English middle-class manhood.
His role as the Captain in The Cruel Sea (1953) called upon his qualities of decent concern and moral decisiveness, while Mandy (1952) offered him a sensitive and caring role as a teacher of deaf children. During the 1950s he became the acceptable image of the British police in, for example, Home at Seven (1952), The Long Arm (1956) and John Ford's Gideon's Day (1958), while simultaneously playing lead roles, somewhat surprisingly, in such Hollywood epics as Howard Hawks' Land of the Pharaohs (1955) and William Wyler's Ben-Hur (1959). Always in demand, he continued to act, with dubbing, after an operation for cancer of the larynx in 1966.
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