More, Kenneth

More, Kenneth (1914-1982), British screen and stage actor, for a time Britain’s top box-office star. He was born in Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire, where his father was an engineer and eccentric inventor. After school he tried engineering and a few other manual jobs, then drifted into show business, performing as part of a stage revue in 1935. He had a couple of bit-parts in films before World War II, and after war service he worked on stage and in television before landing his first good film role as a member of the ill-fated polar expedition in Scott of the Antarctic (1948).

More took several more solid, reliable roles before attaining stardom (though billed only fourth) in the vintage-car comedy Genevieve (1953). He played a tweed-jacketed hearty with an abrasive laugh, and reprised the role in Doctor in the House (1954), the first and best of the medical romp series. He had been a success on stage in The Deep Blue Sea (1952), by Terence Rattigan, as an RAF man embroiled with a possessive married woman, and he reprised the role for the screen version (1955) but the film was disappointing. There were no reservations, though, about Reach For the Sky (1956), with More featuring as the amputee war hero Douglas Bader. It was a critical and box-office triumph, and he was rated the top British star of the time.

More retained this success for several years, though complaining of typecasting: “I seemed fated to be either the stiff-upper-lip war hero or the hearty back-slapping beer-drinking idiot.” He was sure-footed in comedy, as the omnicompetent butler in The Admirable Crichton (1957), based on the play by J. M. Barrie, and in drama as the most level-headed officer on the Titanic in A Night to Remember (1958), or a staunch British naval type trying to Sink the Bismarck! (1960).

For all More’s British fame, he never achieved great success in the United States. He was up for a part in The Guns of Navarone (1961), but he fell foul of John Davis, boss of Rank Studios, and was prevented from taking the role; the setback damaged his career. His box-office standing slipped, and for five years he vanished from films and returned to the stage. Television rescued More: he scored a huge personal success in a dramatization of The Forsyte Saga (1967-1968), based on the novels by John Galsworthy, and began to reappear in films in cameo roles. But he never regained his former status, and his last years were blighted by a battle against Parkinson’s disease.