Stanley Ridges

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Stanley Ridges (July 17, 1890 - April 22, 1951) was a British-born American actor who made his mark in films by playing a wide assortment of character parts. His most famous roles probably were two different professors, one of them the kindly Professor Kingsley in the thriller Black Friday. Kingsley is hit by a car, operated on by Boris Karloff's character, receives the transplanted brain of a gangster, and begins experiencing Jekyll-and-Hyde personality transformations. Ridges' other "scholarly" role is that of the treacherous double agent secretly working for the Nazis, Professor Siletsky, in the original version of Ernst Lubitsch's classic WWII comedy, To Be or Not to Be, starring Jack Benny and Carole Lombard.

Other notable film roles were as the Scotland Yard inspector who is shadowing Charles Laughton in the 1944 film The Suspect, as Major Buxton (Gary Cooper's commanding officer) in the film Sergeant York, and as Cary Travers Grayson, the official White House physician in the film Wilson.

Ridges was a protegé of Beatrice Lillie, and started out as a song-and-dance man on Broadway, but later turned to dramatic roles onstage, appearing in such plays as Maxwell Anderson's Mary of Scotland (as Lord Morton) and Valley Forge (as Lieutenant Colonel Lucifer Tench). He made his film debut in silent pictures, but easily made the transition into sound films in 1934, after appearing in many Broadway shows. He had just begun a career appearing in notable television anthologies such as Studio One and Philco Television Playhouse, when he died at the age of sixty, just two months after he made his last appearance on live TV. His last film, the Ginger Rogers comedy The Groom Wore Spurs, in which he played a mobster, was released only a little more than a month before his death.

Ridges was many times cast in supporting roles in classic films; he played the leading role in only one film, the 1943 B-picture False Faces.