Tall, gaunt and blessed with a stage voice built for the back row, Raymond Massey was cast as Lincoln five times and John Brown twice. The authority was real; a light touch, on the evidence of his one Canadian role, was not.
Fi1m perspective
Massey stands still and speaks slowly, and the effect is of a monument that has agreed to say a few words. He was tall and gaunt, with a voice trained on the London stage from 1922, and film-makers on both sides of the Atlantic looked at him and saw history. He played Abraham Lincoln five times across stage, film and television, and John Brown twice on film. That is not a coincidence; it is a casting note.
The career had two halves and an ocean between them. He came up in British films from the late 1920s, often with Alexander Korda, and in Things to Come (1936) took the double part of John Cabal and Oswald Cabal. Then America, where he created Lincoln on stage in Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1938) and repeated him on screen in 1940, over some public grumbling that a Canadian had no business in the part. He worked with Michael Powell four times, as Andy Brock in 49th Parallel (1941) and Abraham Farlan in A Matter of Life and Death (1946) among them, played the villain Jonathan Brewster in Capra's Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), and was Adam Trask opposite James Dean in East of Eden (1955). Television took him last: five years as Dr Gillespie in Dr Kildare (1961–66).
The reputation rests on difficult men made credible, Trask and Brewster chief among them, and on Lincoln done with the kind of preparation that reads on screen as weight. 49th Parallel shows something else. Massey arrives late, as Andy Brock, a Canadian soldier, in what was his only Canadian part on screen, and the segment is written broad, played to match, and lands with a thump. We had been waiting for him and were let down. After Anton Walbrook's speech at the dinner table, which moved us, and Leslie Howard's camp in the Rockies, where the argument for once runs both ways, Brock's stretch is the film making its point with a mallet, and Massey swings it. The stillness that makes him a Lincoln makes him a poor fit for a scrappy private, and he does not adjust.
The typecasting was a fair complaint and he never quite answered it; he went back to Lincoln whenever asked. Start with the Powell films, where he is surrounded by people who knew what he was for, and keep 49th Parallel in mind as the one where they did not quite manage it. A man who played Lincoln five times finished as a television doctor for five years. We suspect he found it restful.
Biography
Raymond Massey (1896–1983) was a Canadian-American actor. Born in Toronto, he trained at the University of Toronto and Balliol College, Oxford, before making his professional stage debut in London in 1922. He appeared in numerous British and American films from the early 1930s, often in authoritative or historical roles.
Massey received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor for his title role in Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940) and later reprised the part in How the West Was Won (1962). Other notable film credits include Jonathan Brewster in Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), Adam Trask in East of Eden (1955), and Andy Brock in 49th Parallel (1941). On television he played Dr Gillespie in the NBC series Dr Kildare (1961–1966).
He was the brother of Vincent Massey, later Governor General of Canada, and the father of actors Anna Massey and Daniel Massey.
