The first British Invasion - Golden Age Hollywood was also absolutely awash with British actors

Leslie Howard and some American actor in The Petrified Forest

You don't have to have watched many recent American television dramas to realise that there's been a bit of a British Invasion by actors over the past 10 to 15 years. This isn't Brits playing Brits, which has been going on forever - especially if a smart villain in required. It's Brits playing Americans, complete with what are presumably convincing American accents. I'm not sure when the whole TV Brit/Yank thing started, but I do remember the English actress Marianne Jean-Baptiste as an FBI agent in the long-running Without a Trace (which starred the Australian actor, Anthony LaPaglia - again, as an American) from 2002 onwards, but I suspect that House accelerated the trend in 2004, with Hugh Laurie playing a brilliant but semi-deranged drug-addicted hospital diagnostician. Nowadays, watching a new series (usually on Netflix) usually involves playing a game called "Spot the Brits". The reasons...

...American producers cite for disadvantaging their own actors are that the British variety tend to be better trained, more versatile, more professional - and cheaper.

I've watched a lot of old American films in recent months, and I've been struck by just how many leading Golden Age Hollywood stars and character actors were British. I've compiled a list of  the standout performers - the ones who either appeared in a lot of movies, or made a big impact in a handful. I've chosen to focus on the period between 1935 and 1945 - i.e. the very heart of the Golden Age - and I've included only those British-born actors and actresses who made the decision to move to America, rather than those whose parents emigrated for reasons unrelated to their offspring's future career. For instance, although Bob Hope was born in England, he isn't on the list because his parents emigrated when he was 12. Similarly, although Olivia de Havilland and her sister Joan Fontaine were born to British parents in Tokyo, their mother decamped to California when they were relatively young, mainly for the good of the girls' health. The names are in no particular order:

Charlie Chaplin

Stan Laurel

Ronald Colman

Ronald Colman in Lost Horizon

Boris Karloff

Cary Grant

Herbert Marshall

Herbert Marshall and his loving wife in The Little Foxes

Cedric Hardwicke

Cedric Hardwicke in The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Colin Clive

Colin Clive and his creation in Frankenstein

Lionel Atwill

"I love you, you little fool!" - Basil Rathbone and Lionel Atwill in Son of Frankenstein

Charles Laughton

Elsa Lanchester

C. Aubrey Smith (useful fast bowler, once captained England)

C. Aubrey Smith, the tall, moustachioed gent in Another Thin Man

Leslie Howard

Roland Young

Nigel Bruce (Dr Watson to Basil Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes)

Basil Rathbone

Henry Wilcoxon (DeMille stalwart and the vicar in Mrs. Miniver)

Henry Wilcoxon making us all blub in Mrs. Miniver

Ida Lupino

Donald Crisp

Donald Crisp in John Ford's How Green Was My Valley

David Niven

Ray Milland

Madeleine Carroll (Robert Donat's sparring partner in Hitchcock's The 39 Steps)

Madeleine Carroll and Ronald Colman in Prisoner of Zenda

Greer Garson (Mrs. Miniver)

Merle Oberon

Laurence Olivier

George Sanders

Flora Robson

Flora Robson as Queen Elizabeth (just for a change) in The Sea Hawk

Leo G. Carroll

Merle Oberon and Leo G. Carroll, Wuthering Heights

James Mason

Claude Rains

Sydney Greenstreet

Vivien Leigh


Some general observations:

Robert Donat could easily have booked himself a place on the list, but he only made one film in Hollywood - The Count of Monte Christo in 1934 - and just didn't like the place. He was offered the lead role in Captain Blood the following year, but turned it down in order to return to England to star in Hitchcock's The 39 Steps. The Australian actor Errol Flynn played Captain Blood instead.

As to why so many Brits made it in Hollywood, the answers seem obvious. When talkies came in, a lot of American and foreign actors found themselves out of work because they couldn't adjust their acting styles to meet the requirements of the new medium, or had voices which didn't fit their screen image or which the microphones simply didn't like, or sported impenetrably thick regional or foreign accents. By definition, British actors spoke English, and (to my ears) their clipped delivery seemed to suit the primitive recording equipment used in the early talkies.

Most of the British actors who made it in Hollywood had started on the stage - often in rep - and many of them had already appeared in British films: they were camera-ready from day one.

A few British actors (e.g. Ray Milland and James Mason) seem to have deliberately adopted mild Transatlantic accents which didn't sound too alien to American audiences, nor (presumably) offensively phoney to British picture-goers. What Cary Grant was up to, God alone knows - but it certainly worked for him. Ida Lupino is a rare example of one who could go Full American when required. Most simply stuck to their guns (Boris Karloff even got away with playing a supposedly American gangster with a posh English accent and a full-blown lisp - but that was before Frankenstein).

The horror boom of the '30s boosted the British onscreen presence. For instance, the English director James Whale - Frankenstein (1931), The Old Dark House (1932), The Invisible Man (1933) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935) - crammed his movies with fellow-Brits.

Nobody could do interesting suaveness like the English (apart from William Powell, who looked as if he'd been born wearing a dinner jacket)- Ronald Colman, David Niven, Herbert Marshall, Leslie Howard etc. It just seemed to go with the passport.

I was going to end up singling (or doubling?) out Basil Rathbone and Charles Laughton for praise - but as this post is quite long enough already I'll save that for another day.

I'm bound to have missed out one or two names - if you can think of any, please let me know.