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James Donald

James Donald

Birthday: 1917-05-18 | Place of Birth: Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, UK

​From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia James Donald (18 May 1917 - 3 August 1993) was a Scottish actor. Tall and gaunt, he specialised in playing authority figures; military officers, doctors or scientists. Donald was born in Aberdeen, and made his first professional stage appearance sometime in the late-1930s, having been educated at Rossall School on Lancashire's Fylde coast. During World War II he appeared in minor roles in such propaganda classics as In Which We Serve (1942), Went the Day Well? (1942) and The Way Ahead (1944), and he played Mr. Winkle in the 1952 film version of The Pickwick Papers. However, leading roles eluded him until Lust for Life (1956), in which he played Theo Van Gogh. His work in the theatre included Noël Coward's Present Laughter (1943) which starred Coward himself, and The Eagle with Two Heads (1947), You Never Can Tell (1948), and The Heiress (1949) with Ralph Richardson, Peggy Ashcroft and Donald Sinden. He memorably portrayed Major Clipton, the doctor who expresses grave doubts about the sanity of Col. Nicholson's (Alec Guinness) efforts to build the bridge in order to show up his Japanese captors, in the film The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). The final words are his: "Madness!, Madness!" He also played Group Captain Ramsey, the Senior British Officer in The Great Escape (1963), as well as supporting roles in other notable films both in Britain and the United States, including The Vikings (1958), King Rat (1965), Cast a Giant Shadow (1966), and Quatermass and the Pit (1967). Donald starred in a 1960 television adaptation of A. J. Cronin's The Citadel and appeared regularly in many other television dramas in the UK and USA, as well as on stage. In 1961, he played Prince Albert opposite Julie Harris's Queen Victoria, in the Hallmark Hall of Fame production of Laurence Housman's play Victoria Regina. Description above from the Wikipedia article James Donald, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.

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Known For

Acting

Year
Title

Role

1975
Conduct Unbecoming

as    The Doctor

1969
The Royal Hunt of the Sun

as    King Carlos

1967
The Jokers

as    Col. Gurney-Simms

1967
Quatermass and the Pit

as    Dr. Mathew Roney

1966
Cast a Giant Shadow

as    Maj. Safir

1965
King Rat

as    Dr. Kennedy

1963
The Great Escape

as    Ramsey 'The SBO'

1959
Third Man on the Mountain

as    Franz Lerner

1958
The Vikings

as    Lord Egbert

1957
The Bridge on the River Kwai

as    Maj. Clipton

1956
Lust for Life

as    Theo van Gogh

1952
The Small Voice

as    Murray Byrne

1950
Cage of Gold

as    Alan

1949
Edward, My Son

as    Bronton

1949
Trottie True

as    Lord Digby Langdon

1945
The Way Ahead

as    Pvt. Evans Lloyd

1943
San Demetrio London

as    Gunnery Officer - H.M.S. Jervis Bay