Roy William Neill
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Roy William Neill was a film director best known today for directing several of the Sherlock Holmes films starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce.
With his father as the captain, Neill was born on a ship off the coast of Ireland on 4 September 1887 and named Roland de Gostrie. He began directing silent movies in 1917 and went on to helm 107 films, 40 of them silent. Although most of Neill's films were for the most part low-budget B-movies, he was known for directing films with meticulously lit scenes with carefully layered shadows that would become the style of film noir in the late 1940s. In fact, his last film, Black Angel (1946), is considered film noir.
Also credited as R. William Neill, Roy W. Neill, and Roy Neill. Neill died on 14 December 1946 in London, England of a heart attack.
[edit] Selected films
- The Black Room (1935)
- Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943)
- Sherlock Holmes in Washington (1943)
- Sherlock Holmes Faces Death (1943)
- The Spider Woman (1944)
- The Scarlet Claw (1944)
- The Pearl of Death (1944)
- Sherlock Holmes and the House of Fear (1945)
- The Woman in Green (1945) (Trivia: based in part on The Final Problem and The Adventure of the Empty House)
- Terror by Night (1946)
- Dressed to Kill (1946)
- Black Angel (1946)
