Lennox Pawle

Beaming, rotund Lennox Pawle is chiefly remembered for his delightful, albeit brief, performance as the 'pixillated' Mr. Dick in MGM's classic version of David Copperfield (1935). A former newspaperman and owner of a racing publication, Pawle had been on stage in his native England from the 1890's as a comic actor and member of the Maude Adams Playhouse Company. With significant stage experience under his belt, he arrived in the U.S. in 1910. He almost immediately attracted supporting roles on Broadway in long-running hit plays like "Grumpy" and "Monsieur Beaucaire". Only infrequently in films, he portrayed Samuel Pepys in The Glorious Adventure (1922), but otherwise tended to subordinate film acting to his busy stage career. This changed in 1929, when he made three films for Fox. However, during the succeeding decade he made relatively few and all-too-brief appearances on the silver screen before succumbing to a cerebral hemorrhage on February 22, 1936.