 Cecil Parker was one of the great character actors from their golden age, the '30s to the '60s. He could be menacing or authoritative or simply stuffy; he could draw the water of wit from the stone of the most unyielding dialogue. Listen as daughter Sheila Sim asks him in the mildewed Dear Mr Prohack (d. Thornton Freeland, 1949): 'Daddy, you can't lend me a hundred pounds?' 'That is so', he answers, not ceasing to set the table the while. The timing, the absorption in the role of benign but unbudgeable father, is a minute illustration of what made Parker so cherishable. On stage since 1922 and in films from 1933, he made his first real mark as 'Todhunter', the nervous would-be adulterer in The Lady Vanishes (d. Alfred Hitchcock, 1938), and twice more he and Linden Travers were involved in uneasy liaisons - in The Stars Look Down (d. Carol Reed, 1939), where she is bored with him, and Quartet (segment d. Ken Annakin, 1948), he always anxious about discovery. He could be austerely unsympathetic as in the title role of Captain Boycott (d. Frank Launder, 1947) and in Hungry Hill (d. Brian Desmond Hurst, 1947); is wonderfully comic as the pained butler in The Chiltern Hundreds (d. John Paddy Carstairs, 1949) and the shifty 'Major' in The Ladykillers (d. Alexander Mackendrick, 1955); and touching as the middle-class probation officer trying to do his job in I Believe in You (d. Michael Relph, 1952). The truth is that he probably never gave a poor performance - and that there is much more variety in his work than might be supposed. Fortunately for the cinema, he came to prefer it to the stage. WW1 service left him with a neck injury which partly accounted for the courteously tilted head, and which became part of the actor's persona. Brian McFarlane, Encyclopedia of British Film
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