Patric Knowles spent forty years as the upright man beside the exciting one: Will Scarlett to Flynn's Robin, a doctor in Universal's monster films, a brother in Ford's Welsh valley. Decent, reliable, easy to miss, and the parts were written that way.
Fi1m perspective
Watch any of the Warner Bros adventures of the late 1930s and there is usually a man standing a pace behind Errol Flynn, decent, well spoken, agreeing with him. Often it is Patric Knowles. He came out of Yorkshire and regional repertory into British films in 1932, was signed by Warner Bros and sent to Hollywood in 1936, and was put beside Flynn almost at once, as Captain Perry Vickers in The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936) and then as Will Scarlett in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). The studio had found its use for him: the upright supporting man in period adventure, there to make the flamboyant lead look more so.
That is a real job and he did it well, though it is a job designed to go unremarked. Our review of The Adventures of Robin Hood does not mention him, and we do not think that is a failing of the review. The film is built on one straight moral line and Flynn carries it alone; everyone else is scenery with lines. We went back looking for Knowles and found we had to look, which we admit with some discomfort, because he is on screen a good deal and never does anything wrong. He simply never does anything Flynn is not already doing louder.
Freelancing from 1939 gave him more varied rooms, if not larger parts. At Fox he played Ivor Morgan, one of the brothers, in John Ford's How Green Was My Valley (1941), and it suits him: a family picture full of faces, in which being solid and quiet is the point rather than a limitation. At Universal the same year he was Frank Andrews in The Wolf Man, the start of a run in the studio's monster films as the doctor or the sensible young man, roles that even sympathetic accounts describe as formulaic. A war spent as a flying instructor with the RCAF interrupted things, and afterwards he settled into the long second career of the utility player: comic foils, villains, military officers, Lindsay Woolsey opposite Rosalind Russell in Auntie Mame (1958), Henry Tunstall in Chisum (1970), three films for Andrew V. McLaglen, final appearances in 1973.
The knock on him was there from the start. A limerick went round in the 1930s predicting he would not act very well because he looked the way he did, and the studios took the hint and cast him for the profile. That was unkind, and it describes the career fairly well. Nothing in the two films we have reviewed suggests a great actor held back; what they show is a good one who was never handed the scene.
So do not seek him out. Watch The Adventures of Robin Hood for Flynn and How Green Was My Valley for Ford and the singing, and let Knowles turn up, as he did for forty years, a pace behind and perfectly reliable. He is the reason the star looks like a star, and nobody ever went to the pictures for that.
Biography
Patric Knowles (born Reginald Lawrence Knowles) was an English actor. Born in Horsforth, Yorkshire, he made his film debut in the early 1930s and appeared in films through the 1970s. He was signed by Warner Bros. and made his first American film, Give Me Your Heart (1936).
Knowles frequently appeared alongside Errol Flynn, playing his brother in The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936) and Will Scarlett in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). Other notable roles include How Green Was My Valley (1941), The Wolf Man (1941), Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943), Auntie Mame (1958) and Chisum (1970). During the Second World War he served as a flying instructor in the Royal Canadian Air Force. He died in 1995 in California.
