Edmund Gwenn played kindly old men so well that directors, Hitchcock above all, learned to use the kindness against us. Give him something to hide beneath it and he is a pleasure; ask only for warmth and he supplies it, and little else.
Fi1m perspective
For ten minutes of Foreign Correspondent (1940), a cheerful Londoner called Rowley attaches himself to the hero and will not stop talking, delighted with his own company, the sort of man you would move away from on a bus. We laughed at him. Then Hitchcock takes him up a tower and the laugh curdles, and we realised the pleasantness had been the whole point: we had been looking at a harmless old man because that is what Gwenn had told us to see. It is what he did best, and it is the reason directors kept hiring him.
He had been at it a long time before Hollywood noticed. On stage from 1895, in London and Australia, he played Shaw and Galsworthy, and he was in films from 1916. He took his stage part as Hornblower in Galsworthy's The Skin Game into Hitchcock's 1931 film of it, the first of four they made together. Sylvia Scarlett (1935) took him to America, and from 1940 he stayed, arriving in time to be Mr Bennet in Pride and Prejudice (1940). The forties and fifties were the busy years: dozens of supporting parts, and in 1947 the one he is still remembered for, Kris Kringle, the department store Santa Claus in Miracle on 34th Street.
What he brought from the theatre was a habit of playing the man rather than the type. The type was fixed early, kindly, avuncular, faintly whimsical, and a lazier actor would have let it do the work. Gwenn gave each old gentleman a particular way of being pleased with himself, so that his Bonnyfeather in Anthony Adverse (1936) is warm and decent and no more than that, while Rowley is warm and decent and a hired killer. The difference is not in Gwenn; it is in what the script lets him keep back. Anthony Adverse kept its source's furniture and lost its story, and he is good furniture in it. Given a secret, he is something else.
Hitchcock kept coming back for him, and the late parts show why. Captain Wiles in The Trouble with Harry (1955) lets the comic timing run without a chase to interrupt it. Dr Medford, in the 1954 film about giant ants, turns the same benign manner into authority, and the picture is steadier for having him in it. He never carried a picture, and the one reservation anyone raises about him is that he stayed a supporting player after crossing the Atlantic. We do not hold it against him; the films are shorter for his being in them, and better. Start with Foreign Correspondent. Ten minutes is enough to see what he was for.
Biography
Edmund Gwenn, born Edmund John Kellaway, was an English actor. He played John Bonnyfeather in the 1936 film Anthony Adverse.
He is best remembered for his role as Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street (1947), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor and a Golden Globe Award. He received a second Golden Globe Award and an Academy Award nomination for Mister 880 (1950). Gwenn appeared in four films directed by Alfred Hitchcock, including Foreign Correspondent (1940) and The Trouble with Harry (1955).
As a stage actor he performed in the West End and on Broadway in works by playwrights including Bernard Shaw, John Galsworthy and J. B. Priestley. After the Second World War he lived in the United States. His brother was the actor Arthur Chesney and his cousin was the actor Cecil Kellaway.
