Leon Quartermaine was a British actor whose stage career, in Britain and the United States, extended from the early 1900s to the 1950s.
Background
He was born in Richmond, London, and educated at the Whitgift School in Croydon, where one of his contemporaries was The Revd Harold Davidson, later unfrocked while Rector of Stiffkey.
Career
The pair acted together in a school production of the farce Sent to the Tower. In 1921 Quartermaine appeared with Fay Compton in a West End revival of J. M. Barrie"s play Quality Street. Quartermaine made numerous appearances on Broadway between 1903 and 1935, including Laertes (Hamlet, 1904), Lieutenant Osborne in the American premiere of R. C. Sherriff"s Journey"s End (1929), and Malvolio (Twelfth Night, 1930).
Quartermaine appeared in several films during the 1920s and 1930s, including As You Like lieutenant (1936) in which he co-starred as Jacques to Laurence Olivier"s Orlando.
After the Second World War, Quartermaine joined the Royal Shakespeare Theatre for the 1949 and 1950 Stratford festivals, in a company including John Gielgud, Peggy Ashcroft, Anthony Quayle and other leading Shakespearean actors, in Macbeth, Measure for Measure and Much Ado About Nothing. In 1951 he played the part of the Inquisitor in a British Broadcasting Corporation television adaptation of Shaw"s Saint Joan.
Quartermaine died on 25 June 1967, in Salisbury, Wiltshire.
