Nigel Bruce
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
William Nigel Ernle Bruce (February 4, 1895 – October 8, 1953), usually credited as Nigel Bruce, was a British character actor, best known as Dr. Watson in a series of films and a radioseries starring Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes.
The son of a baronet, he was born in Ensenada, Mexico on February 4, 1895, while his parents were on vacation.
He was severely wounded in World War I and spent most of the war in a wheelchair.
In 1920 he began his career on stage and eight years later started working in silent films. In 1934 he moved to Hollywood. During his career he worked on 78 movies, including Treasure Island, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Lassie Come Home, The Corn is Green, and Bwana Devil. He also appeared in the Alfred Hitchcock films Rebecca (1940) and Suspicion (1941).
He typically played buffoonish, fuzzy-minded gentlemen and his signature role was that of Dr. Watson in the Sherlock Holmes series beginning in 1939 with his good friend Basil Rathbone. Holmes purists objected that Watson in the books was an intelligent and capable person (although not an outstanding detective), and that the Bruce portrayal made him seem dimmer and more bumbling than his literary counterpart. A nickname resulting from this portrayal was Boobus Britannicus. For millions of fans, however, Bruce was the definitive Watson. He starred in 14 films and over 200 radio programs as Dr. Watson. Although Watson often appears to be the elder of the two main characters, Bruce was actually three years younger than his co-star Rathbone. Unlike Rathbone, Bruce never got bored of his part and would have liked to be Watson in more films.
Bruce, known as Willy to his friends, was a leading member of the British movie colony in Los Angeles. Unlike some of his contemporaries, he never renounced his British citizenship despite his long residence in the United States.
Bruce died from a heart attack in Santa Monica, California in 1953, aged 58. He was cremated, and his ashes stored in the vault at the Chapel of the Pines Crematory in Los Angeles.
He wrote an autobiography called Games, Gossip, and Greasepaint which has never been published. Excerpts can be read online, however [1].
His last movie, World for Ransom, was released posthumously in 1954.
