page_title: Raymond Massey
section_title: Acting career
hierarchical_section_title: Raymond Massey / Acting career
caption_attribution_description: English: Promotional photograph for the premiere of Robert E. Sherwood's play Abe Lincoln in Illinois, starring Raymond Massey Caption reads as follows: On October 15th at the Plymouth Theatre, the eminent group of playwrights known as the Playwrights Company will present their second offering of the season, Robert E. Sherwood's Abe Lincoln in Illinois, with Raymond Massey as a young Lincoln who wanted principally to be let alone, who was forced more and more by the pressure of circumstances into marriage with Mary Todd and the political battles that made him immortal.
context_page_description: Raymond Hart Massey was a Canadian actor, known for his commanding, stage-trained voice. For his lead role in Abe Lincoln in Illinois, Massey was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor. He also was well known for playing Dr. Gillespie in the NBC television series Dr. Kildare. Today, he is most often seen in the film Arsenic and Old Lace, in his role as the malevolent Jonathan Brewster, who looks like Boris Karloff, and violently attacks anyone who mentions the resemblance.
context_section_description: He first appeared on the London stage in 1922 in Eugene O'Neill's In the Zone. According to his obituary in The New York Times, he appeared in "several dozen plays and directed numerous others" in England over the next decade. The Washington Post credited him with performances in over 80 plays, including Pygmalion with Gertrude Lawrence; Ethan Frome with Ruth Gordon; and the George Bernard Shaw works The Doctor's Dilemma and Candida with Katharine Cornell. In 1929, he directed the London premiere of The Silver Tassie. He received poor reviews in his debut on Broadway in an unorthodox 1931 production of Hamlet.
  The first movie he was in was High Treason (1928). In 1931, he played Sherlock Holmes in The Speckled Band, the first sound film version of the story. In 1934, he played the villain in The Scarlet Pimpernel, and in 1936, he starred in Things to Come, a film adaptation by H.G. Wells of his own speculative novel The Shape of Things to Come (1933). In 1944, Massey played the district attorney in Fritz Lang's classic film noir The Woman in the Window, which starred Edward G. Robinson and Joan Bennett. He portrayed the American Revolutionary War character Abraham Farlan, who hated the British for making him a casualty of that war, in the 1946 film A Matter of Life and Death (titled Stairway to Heaven in the U.S.).
  Despite being Canadian, Massey became famous for playing archetypal American historical figures. He played abolitionist/insurrectionist John Brown in two films: Santa Fe Trail (1940) and again in the low-budget Seven Angry Men (1955). The character of Brown is a wild-eyed lunatic in Santa Fe Trail, whereas he is a well-intentioned but misguided character in the more sympathetic Seven Angry Men. Massey scored a great triumph on Broadway in Robert E. Sherwood's Pulitzer Prize-winning play Abe Lincoln in Illinois despite reservations about Lincoln's being portrayed by a Canadian. He repeated his role in the 1940 film version, for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor.  Massey again portrayed Lincoln in The Day Lincoln Was Shot on Ford Star Jubilee (1956), a silent appearance in How the West Was Won (1962), and two TV adaptations of Abe Lincoln in Illinois broadcast in 1950 and 1951. He once complained jokingly that he was "the only actor ever typecast as a president." His preparation for the role was so detailed and obsessive that one person commented that Massey would not be satisfied with his Lincoln impersonation until someone assassinated him. On stage in a dramatic reading of Stephen Vincent Benét's John Brown's Body (1953), Massey, in addition to narrating along with Tyrone Power and Judith Anderson, took on the roles of both John Brown and Lincoln.
  Raymond Massey played a Canadian on-screen only once, in 49th Parallel (1941).
  During World War II, he teamed up with Katharine Cornell and other leading actors in a revival of Shaw's Candida to benefit the Army Emergency Fund and the Navy Relief Society.
  Massey portrayed Jonathan Brewster in the film version of Arsenic and Old Lace. The character had been created by Boris Karloff for the stage version, and a running gag in the play and the film was the character's resemblance to Karloff. Even though the film was released in 1944, it was shot in 1941, at which time Karloff still was contracted to the Broadway play and could not be released for the filming (unlike his costars Josephine Hull, Jean Adair and John Alexander). Massey and Karloff had appeared together earlier in James Whale's suspense film The Old Dark House (1932).
  After Massey became an American citizen, he continued to work in Hollywood. Memorable film roles included the husband of Joan Crawford during her Oscar-nominated role in Possessed (1947) and the doomed publishing tycoon Gail Wynand in The Fountainhead (1949), with Patricia Neal and Gary Cooper. In 1955, he starred in East of Eden as Adam Trask, father of Cal, played by James Dean, and Aron, played by Richard Davalos.
  Massey became well known on television in the 1950s and 1960s. He was cast in 1960 as Sir Oliver Garne
caption: Raymond Massey in the Broadway production of Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1938)
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