George Zucco Movies and Career Information

George Desylla Zucco (January 11, 1886 – May 27, 1960) was an English character actor who appeared, almost always in supporting roles, in 96 films during a career spanning two decades, from 1931 to 1951. Zucco was born in Manchester, England to a Greek merchant father and an English mother who was a former lady-in-waiting to Queen Victoria. He debuted on the Canadian stage in 1908. He and his wife Frances toured the American vaudeville circuit during the 1910s, their satirical sketch about suffragettes earning them renown. He returned to Britain, and served as a lieutenant in the British Army's West Yorkshire Regiment during World War I. He became a leading stage actor of the 1920s, and made his film debut in 1931, playing Eugène Godefroy Cavaignac in The Dreyfus Case, an early British re-telling of the Dreyfus Affair. Zucco returned to the U.S.A. in 1935 to play Benjamin Disraeli alongside Helen Hayes in Victoria Regina, and appeared with Gary Cooper and George Raft in Souls at Sea (1937). His best known film role was that of Professor Moriarty in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939), opposite Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson. During the 1940s,