page_title: Reginald Denny (actor)
section_title: Acting career
hierarchical_section_title: Reginald Denny (actor) / Acting career
caption_attribution_description: English: The daughter of Reginald Denny applies makeup, on the set of the American film Abysmal Brute (1923), on page 32 of the December 30, 1922 Universal Weekly.
context_page_description: Reginald Leigh Dugmore, better known as Reginald Denny, achieved success both as an English stage, film and television actor, and as an aviator and UAV pioneer. He was also once amateur boxing champion of Great Britain.
context_section_description: Born as Reginald Leigh Dugmore on 20 November 1891 in Richmond, Surrey, England, he came from a theatrical family; his father was actor and opera singer W.H. Denny. In 1899, Master Reginald Denny began his stage career in A Royal Family and starred in several London productions from age seven to twelve. At sixteen, he ran away from a boarding school and trained as a pugilist with Sir Harry Preston at the National Sporting Club; he also appeared in several British stage productions touring the music halls of England The Merry Widow. In 1911, he went to the United States to appear in Henry B. Harris's stage production of The Quaker Girl, then joined the Bandmann Opera Company as a baritone touring India and the Far East India where he performed for Krishna Raja Wadiyar IV.
  Although he worked in "flickers" during 1911 and 1912, Reginald officially began his film career in 1915 with the World Film Company and made films both in the United States and Britain until the 1960s. Among the numerous stage productions in which he starred, Reginald appeared in John Barrymore's 1920 Broadway production of Richard III; the two actors became friends and starred in several films together including Sherlock Holmes (1922), Hamlet (1933), Romeo and Juliet (1936), and Paramount's Bulldog Drummond Series (1937-1938).
  Denny was a well-known actor in silent films and with the advent of talkies, he became a character actor. He played the lead role in a number of his earlier films, generally as a comedic Englishman in such works as Private Lives and later had reasonably steady work as a supporting actor in dozens of films, including The Little Minister (1934) with Katharine Hepburn, Anna Karenina (1935) with Greta Garbo, Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940) and the Frank Sinatra crime caper film Assault on a Queen (1966).  He made frequent appearances in television during the 1950s and 1960s. His last role was in Batman (1966) as Commodore Schmidlapp.
caption: Denny and his daughter in 1922
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