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FELIX AYLMER
"It was once long ago remarked by an ancient divine..."
There existed for several hundred years in the fifties and sixties a certain cadre of British film actors for whom the parts they played fitted like gloves and those gloves were oft-worn and comfortable. Cecil Parker played stuffy upper-class idiots, Raymond Huntley played officious upper-class idiots, Miles Malleson played rather agreeable upper-class idiots, Sam Kydd played *all* the idiots who were not upper class (apart from taxi drivers, which was Fred Griffiths' job) and FELIX AYLMER played Archbishops.
Well, actually he only played such clerical luminaries a couple of times, the earliest being for Michael Powell in his LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP in 1934, then for Lord Oliver in his comedy of manners HENRY V in 1944 and latterly in BECKET. Other than on film his holy orders lead him to dodder across our telly screens as Father Anselm in OH BROTHER!, which was also a splendid vehicle for Derek Nimmo (as, indeed, is a hearse).
But leaving the films you're likely to have seen aside Aylmer put together a film CV that makes Sam 'Orlando' Kydd's and Christopher 'no point, no point at all' Lee's read like bus tickets. His fruity vowels were first heard in the fleapits of the west in 1930 when he set out his stall as the man of choice in matters official as a prison Governor in properly forgotten feature ESCAPE alongside the great Nigel 'Watson' Bruce and the formerly legendary Gerald Du Maurier, a man best known to us now as being the star of a limerick so filthy we have to look away when we write it on bog walls. During the following 8 years of peacetime Aylmer managed to rack up a further 48 films in which he performed roles as wide and varied as Prime Minister Lord Palmerston in SIXTY GLORIOUS YEARS and Prime Minister Lord Palmerston in VICTORIA THE GREAT. We also imagine that Aylmer was the sort of chap who considered all of this a diversion (and that's the sort of word we reckon he'd have used, too) from his proper work on the legitimate stage where no doubt his tights hardly had a chance to air.
On a more serious note, the war and Felix remains as busy as a bee with not even Hitler and his entire Wermacht able to prevent his career in pictures no matter how hard they tried. Busier than Vera Lynne's hairdresser our Felix turned out a further 40 films but of slightly better quality than of old with the aforementioned Blimp probably the best but with THE YOUNG MISTER PITT, MAJOR BARBARA and, in a brilliant display of versatility, SOUTH AMERICAN GEORGE with George Formby amongst the best.
Victory in Europe may have meant a bit of slacking off for soldiers, sailors, airmen and others who had a less busy time during the conflict but for Felix it was time to make some films fit for heroes and it was during the fallow period of his last fifty or so features that he really came into his own and got the roles he had been working on for so long. TRIO, THE LADY WITH THE LAMP (as - would you believe it? - Prime Minister Lord Palmerston), IVANHOE, THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE, SEPARATE TABLES, THE MUMMY, THE ROAD TO HONG KONG, QUO VADIS?, ALICE IN WONDERLAND and MASQUERADE are just a fraction - literally - of the really very good films that fell to his banner before he finally turned up his comfortably slippered toes at the age of 90.
Born of another century (1889 actually) a man who started acting before cinema was even invented managed to make the genre his own in that brilliantly understated way that the best character actors in Britain always did. Not by making great, big films with their names over the titles but by turning in great big performances in what might otherwise have been small roles and making sure they were the people we all remembered for a loooong time. And we remember him now. Sometimes confused with FRANK ROYDE (who never really made any films) simply because Kenneth Williams' impressions of them both sounded exactly the same, we single the great Felix Aylmer out for special mention even though, of course, "as to his character God alone can tell."
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