Wilfrid Lawson

A dustman arrives at a professor's house to sell his daughter for five pounds and, offered ten, turns it down on principle. Wilfrid Lawson plays Alfred Doolittle in Pygmalion (1938) with a face like a wet Sunday and a delivery that pauses just long enough before each outrage for the listener to think he cannot possibly mean it. He does. He has two scenes and takes both, in a film cut by David Lean to move at twice the speed of the play and built around Wendy Hiller's Eliza. We laughed at him and then, a beat later, noticed we agreed with him, which is Shaw's trick; Lawson makes it work by never once playing the dustman as a fool. His contempt for middle-class morals sounds like plain sense because he says it plainly.

He had been on the stage since he was sixteen and in films since East Lynne on the Western Front (1931), in supporting parts until 1938, when The Terror and Pygmalion made him a lead. There followed Pastor Hall (1940), Tower of Terror (1941) and The Great Mr. Handel (1942), and a trip to Hollywood for John Ford's The Long Voyage Home (1940), where he plays the Captain of a tramp steamer. That is a fine film, but its virtues are Gregg Toland's lighting and the crew as a group; Lawson is one of the crowd, and the part gives him nothing to take. The 1950s were quieter, with smaller and often uncredited roles, Prince Bolkonsky in War and Peace (1956) among the larger of them. Then the 1960s brought him back: Black George in Tom Jones (1963), the decrepit butler in The Wrong Box (1966) and Alice in Wonderland the same year. He died in London in October 1966.

The pattern is clear enough. The parts people remember are the short ones, and the type is always some version of the same man: eccentric, abrasive, sometimes close to maniacal, a colourful older working man who has opinions and will share them. British films of the period had a standing need for such a man and Lawson was very often the one they called. His weapon was timing. He could hold a silence a second longer than seemed safe and then land the line, and in a two-minute scene that is a gift. Over ninety minutes the same habit risks becoming a mannerism, and it is not a coincidence that the leading roles are the ones nobody talks about now.

Start with Pygmalion, where Hiller is the reason to go and Lawson is the reason to stay for the interval talk. If the dustman makes you laugh, look for the name in the credits of anything British from the next thirty years; it is often there, usually near the bottom of the list, and usually attached to the face you remember.