Robert Newton Movies and Career Information

Robert Newton (1 June 1905 – 25 March 1956) was an English stage and film actor. Along with Errol Flynn, Newton was one of the most popular actors among the male juvenile audience of the 1940s and early 1950s, especially with British boys. He was cited as a role model by actor Tony Hancock and drummer Keith Moon. Newton was born in Shaftesbury, Dorset, a son of landscape painter Algernon Newton, R.A. He was educated in Lamorna near Penzance, Cornwall, and later at St Bartholomew's School in Newbury, Berkshire. His acting career began at the age of 16 at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 1921 and he followed this by performing in many plays in the West End of London, incdluding Bitter Sweet by Noël Coward and Horatio to Laurence Olivier's Hamlet at the Old Vic. He also appeared in Private Lives on Broadway. From 1932 to 1934 he was the manager of the Shilling Theatre in Fulham, London. Newton's film career included notable ruffians and villains, mostly comedic ones like Bill Walker in George Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara (1941) and Long John Silver in Walt Disney's Treasure Island (1950), but also deadly serious Bill Sikes in David Lean's 1948 film version of Oliver Twist. One