Peter Lawford was the handsome Englishman standing by the piano while somebody else sang. He knew it, said so, and made a long career of it; the trouble came whenever a film asked him to step forward and be the point.
Fi1m perspective
In Ocean's Eleven (1960), Jimmy Foster is introduced sponging off his mother, who is about to marry a man with unhelpful friends. It is a scene with nothing in it, and Lawford does nothing to put something there. He looks well in a jacket, he waits for the bigger stars to arrive, and when they do he steps a pace back. We were bored through that first hour and then irritated about it, because the men on screen could plainly do more and had decided not to; Lawford's particular offence was to be the one who looked most comfortable not bothering.
He had been a child actor in Britain and had a small part in Lord Jeff (1938) before the war thinned Hollywood's supply of young men and he picked up supporting roles in 1942 and 1943. MGM signed him in 1943 and put him first in war films, then in musicals and romances: Good News (1947), Easter Parade (1948) with Fred Astaire and Judy Garland, Little Women (1949) as Laurie. He could not sing or dance to any great degree and the studio cast him in musicals anyway, on the grounds that he looked right and was pleasant to be near. He described the arrangement himself: "I was a halfway-decent-looking English boy who looked nice in a drawing-room standing by a piano." That is not false modesty. It is a job description.
He was brightest in light romantic and musical parts opposite a female star; he made three films with June Allyson, and Good News is the one people point to. The voice sat high and the face did not move much, and when a script asked him to feel something in earnest he tended to indicate it rather than have it. After he left MGM in the early 1950s the parts thinned. By the time he joined the Rat Pack in the late 1950s he had settled into being the well-spoken one at the edge of the frame: five films with Frank Sinatra, four with Sammy Davis Jr., and The Longest Day (1962) as Lord Lovat among a great many other faces. Later there was television, and producing, and the occasional film.
Watch him the way the studios used him, as furniture of a good kind. In a room full of louder people he is restful, and a film that needs a rich friend, a fiancé or a brother who will not take the light gets exactly that. Ask him to carry a scene and you will see the strain. Ask him to hold a drink beside a piano and you will not notice him at all, which is what he was hired for.
Biography
Peter Lawford was an English-American actor. Born in London, he began his screen career as a child and appeared in numerous films from the 1940s onwards, including Mrs. Miniver (1942), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945) and Little Women (1949).
He was a member of the Rat Pack and appeared alongside Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. in Ocean's Eleven (1960) as Jimmy Foster. Other notable roles include Lord Lovat in The Longest Day (1962) and Maj. Caldwell in Exodus (1960). Lawford was the brother-in-law of US President John F. Kennedy through his marriage to Patricia Kennedy.
