Austin Leigh

Biography

Austin Leigh’s face flickered across the silver screen long before most homes had electricity. In 1915 he strutted through Brigadier Gerard, sabre flashing and moustache waxed to perfection; seven years later he weighed anchor on the high-seas serial Adventures of Captain Kettle, trading cavalry boots for a tar-stained pea-coat. By 1924 he had morphed again—this time into the wry, walrus-moustached Old Bill, trudging through the trenches of Old Bill Through the Ages and giving cinema one of its earliest, most human portraits of war.