On today’s podcast, TK, Robin and I will be discussing some films from AFI’s Top 100 list, and I wanted to connect today’s Celebrity Birthday entry to it somehow. As luck would have it, a great actor who appeared in one of the movies we’re talking about was born today in 1913. Anthony Quayle was trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, and became an army officer in World War II. Quayle returned to acting following the end of the war, and from 1948 until 1956 he was a director at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. Though he had appeared in a handful of small, uncredited roles in 1938, Quayle’s first credited film role was in 1948’s Hamlet with Laurence Olivier. Other notable Anthony Quayle credits include The Wrong Man, The Battle of the River Plate, Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure, The Guns of Navarone, HMS Defiant, The Fall of the Roman Empire, and Lawrence of Arabia.
In 1984, he founded the Compass Theatre Company and in 1958 he was knighted. He died from liver cancer on October 20, 1989 at the age of 76.