C
Cecil Mannering
actor, director
- Birth name:
- Cecil Mannering Jones
- Born:
- 1886-12-28, Chester, Cheshire, England, UK
- Died:
- 1974, Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, England, UK
- Professions:
- actor, director
Biography
A Christmas-Eve baby in 1886, Cecil Mannering first drew breath in Chester’s winding rows, Cheshire stone underfoot and the River Dee a whisper away. Within three decades he had slipped behind both camera and grease-paint, steering the earliest flickers of British cinema: he stalked Baker Street’s darkest corners in 1916’s The Valley of Fear, shepherded Dickens’s bruised hero through David Copperfield (1913), and sent music-hall audiences into helpless laughter with the knock-about Giddy Golightly in 1917. When the final reel ran out, he settled in Aylesbury’s gentle hills; there, in 1974, the Buckinghamshire air closed quietly over a life that had helped write the first chapters of screen history.
