W. Graham Brown

Biography

William Graham Browne first drew breath in Ireland, 1870, but the footlights of London and New York soon rechristened him W. Graham Brown. From the 1890s onward he magnetized audiences in the West End and on Broadway, slipping into Penelope’s skin at the Lyceum in 1909 and, sixteen years later, sharpening his comic claws as David Bliss in Noel Coward’s Hay Fever at the Ambassador’s. Silent cinema beckoned only once: in 1915 he swapped stageboards for California sunshine, donning aristocratic velvet to play Lord Burlington in Mrs. Plum’s Pudding, a Christie-Nestor confection that also featured his wife, Marie Tempest. Back home, British studios kept him in elegant orbit around brighter stars—first as the silk-gloved Pignolet in The Lady Is Willing (1934, opposite Leslie Howard) and, finally, as the enigmatic Dr. Kurt Broman in Moonlight Sonata (1937), sharing the screen with Charles Farrell and the legendary fingers of Ignacy Jan Paderewski.