John Clements (actor)

Sir John Clements
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
Spouses	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

Clements attended St Paul's School and St John's College, Cambridge 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. He also started his film work in 1933. Clements was the artistic director of the Chichester Festival Theatre from 1966 to 1973.

He married the actress Kay Hammond and together they became a critical success on stage 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.

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 British Empire (CBE) in 1956 and knighted in 1968. He died in Brighton, East Sussex in 1988.

Filmography

• The Divine Spark (1935)
• Once in a New Moon (1935)
• Things to Come (1936)
• Rembrandt (1936)
• Ticket of Leave (1936)
• Knight Without Armour (1937) as Poushkoff
• I, Claudius (1937)
• South Riding (1938)
• Housemaster (1938)
• Star of the Circus (1938)
• The Four Feathers (1939) as Harry Faversham
• Convoy (1940)
• This England (1941)
• Ships with Wings (1941)
• Tomorrow We Live (1943)
• Undercover (1943) as Milosh Petrovitch
• They Came to a City (1944)
• Train of Events (1949)
• Call of the Blood (1949)
• The Silent Enemy (1958)
• The Mind Benders (1963)
• Oh! What a Lovely War (1969)
• Gandhi (1982)

External links

• John Clements at IMDb
• John Clements archive at the University of Bristol Theatre Collection, University of Bristol