:47:03
Valerie Hobson remembered him as
a terribly sweet man with a good heart.
:47:07
"I don't think he had a very strong
male approach to things,"
:47:11
she told historian Greg Mank.
:47:13
"He was one of the very first people
to make, almost, camp fun."
:47:16
"He did it as a serious thing, you know."
:47:19
"Sort of the arched eyebrow
and arched nostril."
:47:23
Elsa Lanchester recalled him as weird,
strange and acid-tongued.
:47:28
Thesiger opened in the play
A Sleeping Clergyman
:47:31
at the Theatre Guild, New York,
on October 8th, 1934.
:47:34
When it closed after 40 performances,
he was able to train west
:47:38
to join the cast of Bride
after the New Year.
:47:41
Reading Pretorius's dialogue, it is easy to
hear Claude Rains' brushed-velvet tones
:47:46
and imagine the cynical,
twinkling bemusement
:47:48
with which he played
Captain Renault in Casablanca.
:47:51
That same dialogue plays very differently
when enunciated by the man who,
:47:55
in The Old Dark House,
spoke the phrase "Have a potato"
:47:59
and endowed it with
seven levels of malevolence.
:48:04
Thesiger's best film roles are all macabre.
:48:07
Less well-known than
The Old Dark House and The Ghoul
:48:10
are his parts as Marley's undertaker
in the Alistair Sim version of Scrooge,
:48:14
the asthmatic industrial tycoon, swathed
in furs, in The Man in the White Suit,
:48:19
a 19th-century wraith
who must release his dead lover's soul
:48:23
from the body of a possessed girl in the
1948 British thriller A Place of One's Own,
:48:28
and the milk-toast Mr Hoover,
the silk-stocking killer
:48:31
of the 1938 Warner Bros
British production They Drive by Night.
:48:36
Pretorius's preoccupation
with the female being
:48:38
radiates an unhealthy, prurient interest.
:48:41
As the monster realises the implication
of the word "wife", Thesiger's glance
:48:45
suggests that Pretorius will be a most
interested spectator on the honeymoon.