The blue plaque
reads:
| |
In
Memory
of
Victor Andrew
D'Biere
McLaglen
10.12.1886
to
7.11.1959
Boxer & Oscar Winner for
The Informer
|
|
His biography at the
IMDB website [visit link]
tells us:
"Rambunctious
British leading man (contrary to popular belief, he wasn't Irish) and later
character actor primarily in American films, Victor McLaglen was a vital
presence in a number of great motion pictures, especially those of director John
Ford. McLaglen (pronounced Muh-clog-len, not Mack-loff-len) was the son of the
Right Reverend Andrew McLaglen, a Protestant clergyman who was at one time
Bishop of Claremont in South Africa.
The young
McLaglen, eldest of eight brothers, attempted to serve in the Boer War by
joining the Life Guards, though his father secured his release. The
adventuresome young man traveled to Canada where he did farm labor and then
directed his pugnacious nature into professional prizefighting. He toured in
circuses, vaudeville shows, and Wild West shows, often as a fighter challenging
all comers. His tours took him to the US, Australia (where he joined in the gold
rush) and South Africa. In 1909 he was the first fighter to box newly-crowned
heavyweight champion Jack Johnson, whom he fought in a six-round exhibition
match in Vancouver (as an exhibition fight, it had no decision).
When the
First World War broke out, McLaglen joined the Irish Fusiliers and soldiered in
the Middle East, eventually serving as Provost Marshal (head of Military Police)
for the city of Baghdad. After the war he attempted to resume a boxing career,
but was given a substantial acting role in The Call of the Road (1920) and was
well received. He became a popular leading man in British silent films, and
within a few years was offered the lead in an American film, The Beloved Brute
(1924). He quickly became a most popular star of dramas as well as action films,
playing tough or suave with equal ease.
With the coming
of sound, his ability to be persuasively debonair diminished by reason of his
native speech patterns, but his popularity increased, particularly when cast by
Ford as the tragic Gypo Nolan in The Informer (1935), for which McLaglen won the
Best Actor Oscar.
He continued to
play heroes, villains and simple-minded thugs into the 1940s, when Ford gave his
career a new impetus with a number of lovably roguish Irish parts in such films
as She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and The Quiet Man (1952). The latter film won
McLaglen another Oscar nomination, the first time a Best Actor winner had been
nominated subsequently in the Supporting category.
McLaglen formed
a semi-militaristic riding and polo club, the Light Horse Brigade, and a
similarly arrayed precision motorcycle team, the Victor McLaglen Motorcycle
Corps, both of which led to apparently erroneous conclusions that he had fascist
sympathies and was forming his own private army. The facts prove otherwise, and
despite rumors to the contrary, McLaglen did not espouse the far right-wing
sentiments often attributed to him.
He continued to
act in films into his 70s and died, from heart failure, not long after appearing
in a film directed by his son, Andrew V. McLaglen"