Roland Pertwee

Biography

Brighton, 1885: a seaside boy with paint under his fingernails grows up to be Roland Pertwee, scholarship winner at the Royal Academy School of Art. Canvas and oils, however, proved unforgiving—portrait sitters took one look at their likenesses, slammed shut their cheque-books and marched off. The easel abandoned, Pertwee walked straight onto the boards, trading pigments for footlights. He thrived. Charles Hawtrey and H.R. Irving both counted him in their companies, and the young actor boasted he “couldn’t recall a single week without a pay packet.” Then the Great War called. In France with the British Army he scribbled short stories between barrages, posting them home; every one sold, financing a convalescent novel written from a London hospital bed. Peace turned him into a storytelling machine: plays, film scripts, magazine serials, briskly profitable shorts. In 1927 he and Harold Dearden unveiled “Interference”; Gilbert Miller whisked it to Broadway, and audiences on both sides of the Atlantic leaned forward in their seats. Pertwee’s curtain fell in London, 1963, age 77, leaving behind a shelf of words where canvas once stood.