Leonard Mudie (born Leonard Mudie Cheetham; April 11, 1883 – April 14, 1965) was an English character actor whose career lasted for nearly fifty years. After a successful start as a stage actor in England, he appeared regularly in the US, and made his home there from 1932. He appeared in character roles on Broadway and in Hollywood films.
In The Manchester Guardian, James Agate commented on Mudie's acting in 1909, "[He] has a definite and genuine feeling for the stage. His enunciation is very faulty, his accent not good … but the acting instinct is there."[2] With the Horniman company Mudie made his London and American debuts.[1]
Mudie made his film debut in a Boris Karloff film, The Mummy in 1932. He moved to Hollywood in that year, and lived there for the rest of his life.[3] He played a range of screen parts, some substantial, and others short cameos. Among the bigger roles were Dr Pearson in The Mummy, Porthinos in Cleopatra (1934), Maitland in Mary of Scotland (1936), and De Bourenne in Anthony Adverse (1936). His small roles, according to The New York Times, were typically "a bewigged, gimlet-eyed British judge".[3]
Mudie made the postwar transition into television, and appeared in four episodes of Adventures of Superman, in roles ranging from the comedic to the sinister. For the postwar cinema he played the regular character Commander Barnes in the series of Bomba, the Jungle Boy films.[3] Mudie's final acting role was as one of the elderly survivors of a wrecked spaceship in “The Cage”, the first pilot episode of Star Trek, which was filmed in 1964 but not broadcast on television in full until 1988.
