John Clements (actor)

Sir
John Clements
CBE

John Clements in 1954
Born (1910-04-25)25 April 1910
London, England, UK
Died 6 April 1988(1988-04-06) (aged 77)
Brighton, Sussex, England, UK
Years active 1935–1982
Spouse(s)
  • Inga Maria Lillemor Ahlgren
    (married 1936–1946)
  • Kay Hammond
    (married 1946–1980)

Sir John Selby Clements, CBE (25 April 1910 – 6 April 1988) was an English actor and producer who worked in theatre, television and film.

Biography

Theatre career

Clements attended St Paul's School and St John's College, Cambridge[1] then worked with Nigel Playfair and afterwards spent a few years in Ben Greet's Shakespearean Company. He made his first stage appearance in 1930. Clements founded the Intimate Theatre at Palmers Green in 1935, which is a combined repertory and try-out theatre. He appeared in almost 200 plays, and presented a number of plays in the West End as actor-manager-producer. Clements was the artistic director of the Chichester Festival Theatre from 1966 to 1973.

In December 1951 he directed Man and Superman at the Wimbledon Theatre, Surrey, and played the role of John Tanner alongside Allan Cuthbertson. He married the actress Kay Hammond and together they became a critical success with their West End revival of Noël Coward's play Private Lives in 1945. In 1952 they both appeared in Clements' own play The Happy Marriage, an adaptation of Jean Bernard-Luc's Le Complexe de Philemon. Clements starred as Edward Moutlon Barrett in the musical Robert and Elizabeth, a successful adaptation of The Barretts of Wimpole Street. His stepson is the actor John Standing.

Film career

John Clements and Ralph Richardson in The Four Feathers (1939)

As a film actor John Clements played bit parts of increasing size for Alexander Korda's London Films in the 1930s. He made quite an impression opposite Robert Donat and Marlene Dietrich in Knight Without Armour as Poushkoff, an over-sensitive commissar who saves their lives during the Russian Revolution. He came to further prominence when film director Victor Saville chose him to star opposite Ralph Richardson in South Riding (1938). The two actors were reunited in the very successful The Four Feathers (1939).

After this, Clements' film career was somewhat intermittent, although he made a series of British war films for Ealing Studios and British Aviation Pictures, such as Convoy (1940), Ships with Wings (1942), Tomorrow We Live (1943) and as Yugoslav guerrilla leader Milosh Petrovitch in Undercover (1943). He had a cameo role (as Advocate General) in Gandhi (1982).

Clements was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1956 and was knighted in 1968. He died in Brighton, East Sussex, in 1988.

Filmography

References

  1. ↑ "Sir John Selby Clements". Person Page - 18344. thepeerage.com. 3 February 2006. Retrieved 30 March 2011.
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