1898-1977
Australian born character actor (and occasional director) Cyril Ritchard (Cyril Joseph Trimnell-Ritchard) was born on this day in Surry Hills, Australia (a suburb of Sydney). Educated in Sydney by Jesuits and studied medicine at the Sydney University. He completed his studies and briefly went into medicine, but had a long love of non-professional acting and decided in 1917 to take that passion pro. After a couple of years of fits and starts, he went on a professional tour in New Zealand as a dancer, where he and his dancing partner--one Madge Elliott--appeared in musicals. Sometime after 1918 he immigrated to the New York City area and took up stage acting there. In the mid-1920's he left the U.S. for the stage in London, reuniting with Elliot there; they would eventually marry some ten years later. Though both of them were actors of the stage and Ritchard was also a talented director of stage production--especially comedy musicals--both did have film careers--his longer than hers. They both made their film debut in On With The Dance in 1927 while living in the UK. It is listed as a silent film, but it is also a lost film, so it is possible that it was some sort of early sound musical dance short (or possibly a "phonofilm" in which an accompanying disc was played along with the film at screening); it is equally possible that it was actually silent with proscribed soundtrack listing. He appeared in just two more films in the 1920's; both of which were films with some type of sound and both were released in 1929. The first of these was the large budget BIP production Piccadilly, which survives and has been released on disc. While Piccadilly is a pretty famous late 1920's film, Ritchard's next film is one of the most famous releases of 1929. He both acted in and contributed his first musical number in a film to Alfred Hitchcock's all sound crime thriller Blackmail, released in October of that year. His next film appearance did not come until well over a year after, when he appeared in the U.K. musical Just For A Song, released in December of 1930. In 1937, two years after his marriage to Elliott, he appeared in two very early television shorts, one of which--Pasquinade--was an early BBC production starring Herminone Baddeley. His first appearance in an actual television series came is in the U.S. variety series The Billy Rose Show in the 1951 episode Duet for Two Actors, in which he appeared along side Frank Albertson, who would go on less than ten years later to play the "dirty old man" Tom Cassidy in Hitchcock's Psycho. All of his appearances after this up until 1966 were on the small screen, including a made-for-television film of his stage role as Capt. Hook in a musical production of Peter Pan in 1955 (he won a Tony for his role in the live stage production). In 1966 he provided voice work on the animated anthology The Daydreamer, based on the writings of Hans Christian Andersen, which also featured silent era star Tallulah Bankhead. He there after made appearances mostly on television, including multiple appearances on The Red Skelton Hour. His last role came in the 1977 animated film The Hobbit, made for television by ABC and aired on the 27th of November. He passed away less than a month later on the 18th of December of that year at the age of 79. He passed away in his adopted home city of Chicago and was buried at Saint Mary's Cemetery in Ridgefield, Connecticut, along with his beloved wife, who had passed in 1955, preceding him in death by over twenty years.
[Source: Jack Sanders (Find A Grave)]
His wedding to Madge Elliott
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