J
Johnny Butt
actor
- Birth name:
- George John Butt
- Born:
- 1878-04-03, Shoreditch, London, England, UK
- Died:
- 1931-06, Lambeth, London, England, UK
- Professions:
- actor
Biography
A cockney spring bubbled up on 3 April 1878 in Shoreditch, delivering John William Butt—soon just “Johnny” to marquees and music-hall habitués. Between curtain-up and camera-crank he slipped into velvet coats, frock coats, no coat at all, whatever the role demanded. Audiences first glimpsed him on celluloid as Wilkins Micawber in the 1913 David Copperfield, then as the boisterous stage-door sweetheart in Trelawny of the Wells (1916), and finally larking down the Thames in Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat (1920). The footlights dimmed for good in June 1931 when he drew his last breath in a Lambeth nursing-home, four miles but a lifetime from the Shoreditch street where his story began.
