Anthony John Hawtrey (22 January 1909 – 18 October 1954) was an English actor and stage director. He began his acting career in 1930 and began directing by 1939. As director of the Embassy Theatre in London, his productions sometimes achieved enough success to transfer to the West End. During his theatre career, Hawtrey also acted in television and on film. He was a member of the Terry family of actors.
Hawtrey was born in Claygate, Surrey, the illegitimate son of the actors Sir Charles Hawtrey[1] and Olive Morris (the daughter of Florence Terry), and was educated at Bradfield College prior to studying for the stage under Bertha Moore.
From 1930 Hawtrey worked as an actor in London, on tour in South Africa, and with the Liverpool Repertory Company.[citation needed] He appeared as the King of France in the Old Vic's production of King Lear in 1931, when his cousin John Gielgud played Lear.[2] In 1939 he was director of productions at the Embassy Theatre in north London, subsequently becoming director at the Swindon Repertory Company. Hawtrey then became the second manager of the Dundee Repertory Theatre, succeeding Robert Thornley as Director of Productions in December 1940. He opened with a Christmas adaptation of The Scarlet Pimpernel,[3] and from 1940 to 1942 he directed and acted in over 40 plays in Dundee.
In January 1945 Hawtrey reopened the Embassy, which had been closed due to bomb damage, and under his directorship there followed a string of successful productions. From the first two years' output, 20 plays in all, he selected six for publication, in two volumes, under the title Embassy Successes,[4] namely
Of these, Worm's Eye View and No Room at the Inn enjoyed successful transfers to the West End, at the Whitehall and Winter Garden Theatres respectively, and the plays were made into films.
In 1948 a third volume of Embassy Successes comprised
Further successes followed, among them the Sylvia Rayman play Women of Twilight, which proved a major hit for Hawtrey and the Embassy in 1951/52, transferring to both the Vaudeville Theatre and the Victoria Palace Theatre, and was made into a film.[5]
Introducing the first two volumes of Embassy Successes, Hawtrey wrote: "Our policy is this. To present new plays dealing with today's world – in terms of entertainment. If these plays are written by new playwrights, so much the better. I am aware that the English theatre cannot properly thrive unless there is a constant supply of fresh dramatists. At the Embassy, we shall always do everything in our power to foster this supply."[6] Val Gielgud, in the third Embassy Successes book, praised Hawtrey's "persistent refusal to be deterred from experiment by difficulties of staging which too frequently have proved fatal to the chances of a play's production in the West End."[7] According to the actor Leslie Phillips, Hawtrey "was a charming, easy-going man with a great sense of humour and a natural instinct for popular theatre."[8]
In parallel with his work in theatre, Hawtrey also acted in television productions and several films, a few of which were
He was married to the actress Marjorie Clark, with whom he had two sons, Charles and the actor Nicholas (1932–2018).[1] He died in London of a heart attack in 1954 at the age of 45.[9]