Reginald Owen

The son of Joseph and Frances Owen, Reginald Owen studied at Sir Herbert Tree's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and made his professional debut in 1905. In 1911, he starred in the original production of Where the Rainbow Ends as Saint George which opened to very good reviews on 21 December 1911. Reginald Owen had a few years earlier met the author Mrs. Clifford Mills as a young actor, and it was he who on hearing her idea of a Rainbow Story persuaded her to turn it into a play, and thus Where the Rainbow Ends was born.[2] He co-authored the play with Mills using the pseudonym John Ramsey.

He went to the United States in 1920 and worked originally on Broadway in New York City, and later moved to Hollywood, where he began a lengthy film career. He was a familiar face in many Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer productions.

Owen is perhaps best known today for his performance as Ebenezer Scrooge in the 1938 film version of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, a role he inherited from Lionel Barrymore, who had played the part of Scrooge on the radio every Christmas for years until Barrymore broke his hip in an accident.[3]

Reginald Owen as Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet (1933)

Owen was one of only a small number of actors to play both Sherlock Holmes and his companion Dr. Watson. Among other actors who have played both Holmes and Watson are Jeremy Brett,[4] Carleton Hobbs,[5] Patrick Macnee,[6] Howard Marion-Crawford,[7] and Edward Woodward.[8][9]

Owen first played Watson in the film Sherlock Holmes (1932), and then Holmes in A Study in Scarlet (1933). Having played Ebenezer Scrooge, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, Owen has the odd distinction of playing three classic characters of Victorian fiction only to live to see those characters be taken over and personified by other actors, namely Alastair Sim as Scrooge, Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Watson.

Later in his career, Owen appeared with James Garner in the television series Maverick in the episodes "The Belcastle Brand" (1957) and "Gun-Shy" (1958) and guest starred in episodes of the series One Step Beyond, Kentucky Jones, and Bewitched. He was featured in the Walt Disney films Mary Poppins (1964) and Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971). He had a small role in the 1962 Irwin Allen production of the Jules Verne novel Five Weeks in a Balloon. In August 1964, his mansion in Bel Air was rented to the Beatles, who were performing at the Hollywood Bowl, when no hotel would book them.[10]

Owen died from a heart attack at age 85 in Boise, Idaho, and eventually was buried at the Morris Hill Cemetery in Boise.

• Alistair, Rupert (2018). "Reginald Owen". The Name Below the Title : 65 Classic Movie Character Actors from Hollywood's Golden Age (softcover) (First ed.). Great Britain: Independently published. pp. 204–207. ISBN 978-1-7200-3837-5.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Reginald Owen.

• Reginald Owen at the Internet Broadway Database
• Reginald Owen at IMDb
• Reginald Owen at Find a Grave