C. Montague Shaw

Biography

Distinguished-looking C. Montague Shaw came to personify the somewhat tweedy but intellectual British scholar or professorial type in many of his more than 150 films, but he was actually an Australian, born in Adelaide in 1884. He began his stage career in Australia with a repertory company, and after touring that country the company traveled to Great Britain. Eventually he began appearing in plays on the London stage. He was also what was known as an "elocution" teacher, instructing actors, business executives and others on the best ways of expressing oneself through language and speech exercises. He became quite respected in this field, traveling throughout British Colonial Africa, Canada and the US in these endeavors. His film career began in 1926 in two-reel shorts, but he soon graduated to full-length features. He appeared in many of the more distinguished productions of the 1930s, such as David Copperfield (1935) and A Tale of Two Cities (1935), but more often than not his roles were smaller and sometimes unbilled. However, he did much better in the serial field, where he had substantial parts as scientists, villains, the heroine's father, etc., in such classic chapter plays as Daredevils of the Red Circle (1939), Ace Drummond (1936), Undersea Kingdom (1936) and Zorro's Fighting Legion (1939). He made his last film in 1949 (The Pilgrimage Play (1949)) and died at the Motion Picture Country Home in Woodland Hills, California, on February 6, 1968, at age 85.