Leonard Mudie

Leonard Mudie was a stalwart acting veteran who made nearly 150 appearances before the camera. He was from the Midlands of England and began on stage in 1908 at the Gaiety Theater (1884-1959) in Manchester. This was the first regional repertory theater in England and well noted for the spectrum of plays produced and the patronage of new plays by local writers.

Mudie was well accomplished when he came to America and Broadway in 1914, where he first appeared in the original play "Consequences".

Later in 1921 Mudie was lured to Hollywood and silent films, sampled two for a year and then returned to Broadway.

He managed to appear as at least a featured extra - not always with lines - in many of the great and historic films of the mid 1930s.

But after late 1931 Mudie returned to Hollywood, not to return to the Great White Way until his last appearance in 1948. Hollywood sound era could use his efficient, somewhat nasal British intonation and did - profusely.

Appeared in fourteen Best Picture Oscar nominees: The House of Rothschild (1934), Viva Villa! (1934), Cleopatra (1934), Les Misérables (1935), Top Hat (1935), Captain Blood (1935), The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936), Anthony Adverse (1936), Lost Horizon (1937), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Dark Victory (1939), Foreign Correspondent (1940), The Letter (1940) and Random Harvest (1942).

In 1935 alone he was in thirteen films. And in one of these he was a particularly noteworthy judge. Warner Bros.

was gambling on a dashing but relatively untried and unknown Australian (well Tasmanian) actor named Errol Flynn for a hoped hit remake version of the Rafael Sabatini novel Captain Blood (1935). Production was combing Hollywood for character actors for the huge cast, and Mudie was picked for one of the most villainous yet historical characters of the film, Chief Judge George Jeffreys, Baron of Wem, the "Hanging Judge", who presided over the "Bloody Assizes", the wholesale trials of the followers of the Duke of Monmouth's Rebellion at the beginning of the film. Flynn's first big dramatic scene is his confrontation with Jeffreys, bewigged and looking ashen with the kidney disease killing him. It is a great scene with great lines for both actors.

Mudie was busy with over ten roles per year from 1937 thru 1941 before he began to slow down, age bringing about fewer character roles -- four or so per annum in the ensuing years.

He had a somewhat prophetic line playing an old traditional actor Horace Karlos in a Charlie Chan whodunit The Scarlet Clue - Sidney Toler As Charlie Chan (1945) when he makes a reference to appearing in the still infant television as "Well, it's a living!" Indeed by 1953 Mudie got his feet wet in TV, and by later 1955 he was more a fixture of that medium than film and visiting all the varied series with a full sprinkling of character roles-including judges.

About half his roles to 1946 were uncredited, but his was a steady voice of realism in whatever the part: stiff British official, doctor, lawyer - lots of judges - but also many an everyman role.

He was active there off and on through 1948 in some twenty-five roles.

Along with Felix Locher, Judith Anderson, Morgan Farley, Richard Hale, Anthony Jochim, Celia Lovsky, Charles Seel, Bill Borzage, Abraham Sofaer and Ian Wolfe, he is one of only eleven "Star Trek" actors to have been born in the 19th Century. He played one of the illusory survivors of the SS Columbia in Star Trek: The Original Series: The Cage (1986). After Locher, he was the second earliest-born "Star Trek" actor and the first to die.