 A monumental character player who terrified a generation of schoolchildren, and not a few adults, when, as Magwitch in David Lean's Great Expectations (1946), he leapt out at the young Pip in a gloomy cemetery. Born in Edinburgh in 1878, he was formerly an organist and choirmaster, and on stage from 1898 and in films from 1931's The Old Man (d. Manning Haynes, 1931), the craggy, white-haired Currie continued to act into his '80s, often dour and forbidding, sometimes merely irascible as in The Mudlark (d. Jean Negulesco, 1950, as gillie John Brown) and Trio (d. Harold French, 1950), sometimes zealous as in Quo Vadis (US, d. Mervyn LeRoy, 1951), as St Peter, and occasionally benign, as the reluctant retiree (a role he never sought in life) in the tender B-movie, The End of the Road (d. Wolf Rilla, 1954). He worked in Hollywood in the early '50s and the '60s, and made Kangaroo (US, d. Lewis Milestone, 1951) in Australia, where he had toured earlier in the century. He was married to American musical comedy star, Maude Courtney, with whom he formed a stage team in the 1890s. Brian McFarlane, Encyclopedia of British Film
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