Deerstalkers and stiff upper lips on the boulevards

The chronicler examines “the extraordinary feat of colonization achieved there by the British from the coming of sound through fifty years to the final destruction of the old studio structures by television”. This may seem like odd maths because “talkies” began properly in 1927 and it was in the 1950s that TV exploded in popularity in the US, to the detriment of cinemas. Still, this was only the heyday of the British “colonisation” with their tea parties, nannies, cricket and polo, and Morley also tells of earlier pioneers and later stalwarts to give the fuller picture.

While we are nitpicking, “raj” is Hindi for “rule” or “kingdom”, so perhaps it’s a bit of a long stretch to compare these few decades during the “Golden Age” of Hollywood with the almost-century-long British Raj governing the Indian sub-continent (and another century-plus of presence before that). Still, who’s arguing anyway when Morley has plenty of interesting details and anecdotes along the way to satisfy any dedicated cinephile, British and American. And who are we at The Budapest Times to sniff at a little bit of artistic licence?

When the book came out in 1983 it was titled “Tales From the Hollywood Raj, The British in California”. That it remains in print in 2025 is thanks to the good offices of Dean Street Press, a publisher dedicated to revitalising worthwhile books that might otherwise be lost to time.

One arrival in Hollywood was Morley’s grandmother Gladys Cooper, born in south-east London in 1888 and who became a star of the British stage. She made several silent films in Britain and theatre appearances on Broadway in New York before beginning her Hollywood career at age 52 in Alfred Hitchcock’s film “Rebecca” in 1940.

Cooper “belonged to that C. Aubrey Smith generation who colonized Beverly Hills as surely as their parents had once colonized Asia and Australia”, Morley writes. Unfortunately this meant a patronising attitude. She had an unshakably English attitude, that the Americans were there to be taught proper language, to be encouraged towards a more European way of life, to be civilised if possible and dealt with if not. They were to be spoken to loudly, tersely and clearly, to be urged into the Second World War, off the drink and out into the fresh air.

For Cooper, who after all was a child of the Victorian age, her American hosts were not to be mocked, patronised or cheated but neither were they to be treated as equals, exactly, even if their wealth, lives and weather were vastly superior to anything she had known in England.

She wasn’t alone in this. As Cedric Hardwicke commented in 1935: “God felt sorry for actors so he gave them a place in the sun and a swimming pool; all they had to sacrifice was their talent.” Or as Morley himself heard English actor Robert Coote call disapprovingly to Cooper during a social gathering at her home in Pacific Palisades: “Darling, there seems to be an American on your lawn”. Coote played aristocrats or British military types in many films.

And in the very beginning of cinema history the absolute first of the Hollywood English was Eadweard Muybridge, born in Kingston-on-Thames in 1830, who sailed for America in 1852, three years after news of the California gold rush reached Kingston. in 1882 he devised a series of photographs of animals and humans in motion by lining up 12 cameras  along a racetrack then printing the individual shots onto a revolving disc, thus giving the world its first-ever moving picture.

After him came the founder of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, who starred in a version of “Macbeth” filmed in a studio before the area was even called Hollywood. Music-hall entertainers Charles Chaplin and Stan Laurel were also early to establish a British presence. Understandably in the early days, expatriates were often such theatrical celebrities. Although lured west by the better pay and all that sunshine, it didn’t stop them often being sniffy about films compared with the “legitimate” stage.

Donald Crisp, a Scotsman, deserves the Brit-in-Hollywood long-service medal, reaching the Biograph motion picture company in 1910 and appearing as General Grant in “Birth of a Nation” in 1915, then directing some of the best of Douglas Fairbanks’ and Buster Keaton’s  films in the 1920s. Crisp won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in “How Green Was My Valley” (1941), and played his final role as a crusty old Scot in “Spencer’s Mountain” in 1963.

It was Elinor Glyn, born Elinor Sutherland in Saint Helier, Jersey, in October 1864 who popularised the concept of the “it girl”, bringing global fame to America’s Clara Bow in 1927.

And so the Brits came, filling roles – George Arliss the distinguished old buffer, Ronald Colman the moustachioed romantic, Clive Brook the clean-limbed officer, Claude Rains and Herbert Marshall the character men, Basil Rathbone and Boris Karloff the villains.

Interestingly, as Morley points out, some of the best-known of the Hollywood British had never been British at all: Errol Flynn, who defeated the Armada and led “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (1936) in fact hailed from Tasmania, Australia; George Sanders “was Russian” (well, he may have been born in in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1906 but was of Scottish parentage); Laurence Harvey came from Joniškis in Lithuania, and Leslie Howard had Hungarian parentage and was English only by his accident of birthplace in London.

Because of the stretch of empire, Rathbone was actually born in Johannesburg, South Africa, Merle Oberon in Bombay, India, and Vivien Leigh in Darjeeling, India. But they were utterly English and able to symbolise something that Hollywood felt was unavailable locally.

Not everyone was a success, for instance Laurence Olivier was a flop at first. English writers too were involved. For some, such as Noël  Coward, Hollywood was a place to be cheerfully visited and then forgotten. William Somerset Maugham took the money and ran. P.G. Wodehouse bit the hand that fed, laughing in his naive way about the high pay for little work. For Ivor Novello it was a spiritual and artistic death. Edgar Wallace did die, of pneumonia.

As Sheridan reports: “By the time the war ended, the British community here had already begun to disinegrate; the vogue for British costume dramas was already passing, the best of the actors had gone home, those that were left began to get very nervous of the new (often temporary) arrivals from London, the smog began to descend, television caught on and then suddenly it was all over.”

And “Now the British actor in California tends to be out there on a short-term contract, for a single movie or television series, and the coming of the 10-hour flight across the Pole from London has made Los Angeles just one more location stop where before it was a way of life.”

That’s life and all we can do is look back, in this case thanks to a fascinating and entertaining read to embellish our cinematic enjoyment.

Postscript: The Budapest Times noticed this sentence in the book: “They [Hollywood] are ransacking the world of literature, poetry and art for suitable subjects.” Absolutely. When was the last time the French filmed “Tom Sawyer” or the Italians did “Moby-Dick”?