David Manners will always be associated with one of the greatest of horror films, Tod Browning's Dracula (1931), starring Bela Lugosi in the title role. Manners, who has died aged 97, played Jonathan Harker, the rather stiff fiance of the Count's prime victim, Mina.
What one remembers most about him is a closeup of his neck as his beloved, now a vampire, stares hungrily at it. Just as she is about to strike, the hero protects Harker with a crucifix. In the finale, Harker rescues Mina from Dracula's castle crypt. 'We thought he'd killed you, dear Mina," he says. 'The daylight stopped him. Oh, if you could have seen the look on his face." Although it was Manners's most famous role, it was the least interesting in the film. His good looks and youth - he made his last film at the age of 35 - kept him in tailor's dummy parts.
His best role was actually in the all-male Journey's End (1930), his first film. Based on the play by R C Sherriff, set in the first world war trenches, it was also the debut feature of British-born director James Whale, who would make his reputation with Frankenstein. Manners had charm as Second Lieutenant Raleigh, an 18-year-old who thinks it's "a frightful bit of luck" to be assigned to the company of Captain Stanhope, whom he hero-worships.
Manners claimed to be a descendant of William the Conqueror, but he was Canadian, born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and splendidly christened Rauff de Ryther Duan Acklom. He was related, on his mother's side, to Lady Diana Cooper and the Duke of Rutland, and on his father's to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
After touring with Basil Sydney's theatre company in 1924, he made his Broadway debut in Dancing Mothers, starring Helen Hayes. The stage manager was George Cukor, with whom Manners became close friends, and who directed him in the film version of Clemence Dane's A Bill Of Divorcement (1932). It was Katharine Hepburn's first film, and Manners, already with a dozen pictures behind him, gave her great encouragement on the set. He played her fiance, rejected because of madness in her family. He and Hepburn were to be reunited (although he had a minor role) in his last film, A Woman Rebels (1936).
Manners had made an impression as the caliph in the first of three versions of Kismet (1930), and as one of four injured flying aces desperately living it up in Paris in William Dieterle's The Last Flight (1931). In the same year, he managed to avoid sentimentality in his performance as a blind pilot saved from suicide by Barbara Stanwyck in Frank Capra's The Miracle Woman.
Manners was fetching in a toga in the Eddie Cantor musical Roman Scandals, and in The Warrior's Husband (both 1933), and played the title role in The Mystery Of Edwin Drood (1935). But it was on Universal horror movies that his reputation rested. He again came to the rescue of the heroine in The Mummy (1932), starring Boris Karloff. In The Black Cat (1934), he is the husband of a woman about to be Karloff's sacrificial victim.
In 1936, having earned enough money, as well as having inherited a decent amount, Manners gave up acting in order to write two novels and two well-received philosophical works. He returned to the Broadway stage a couple of times in 1946: in Maxwell Anderson's problem play Truckline Cafe, and in Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan.
Manners, who was married briefly, lived for some years with the writer William Mercer in Pacific Palisades, where the couple ran an art gallery. He had been a regular visitor to George Cukor's gay Sunday salons at the director's West Hollywood mansion. In the last few decades, he lived a reclusive life in Santa Barbara, occasionally being tracked down by fans.