Do you ever wake up with a particular actor in your head, one which you take around with you through your day in sort of a running loop of his or her best performances? I sure do… and today’s subject is British character actor Miles Malleson. If the name doesn’t ring a bell, surely the face will…

There he is in Peeping Tom (1960), providing a bit of comic relief in an otherwise grim affair of scopophilia and serial murder, sidling into his local news agent’s for a pack of girlie photos. The bit is far from Malleson’s best work but it is most certainly signature work and a great encapsulation of the Malleson magic: the waffling, mumbling, chortling and at times popeyed paranoia with which Malleson etched the perfect fool. It was his stock-in-trade and he played the part to perfection in dozens of films.

Despite his big screen persona as an ass of the first water, Miles Malleson was a renaissance man, whose work ran the gamut from theatre to film to radio to television. He was an actor, a producer, a director, a playwright and screenwriter specializing in fact-based period pieces to which he labored to bring historical accuracy. Born in Croydon, Surrey in 1888 (the year of the Ripper murders!), William Miles Malleson was educated at Brighton College and Cambridge University, where he excelled at cricket and entertained the notion of becoming a schoolmaster until acting became a going concern. The young trouper was offered a spot with the Liverpool Repertory, which led to study at The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. On the boards, Malleson honed his craft as an apprentice to Glasgow actor Dennis Eadie, cinema’s first Disraeli (1916). “Working with him,” Malleson told Picturegoer in October of 1949, "I learnt that the actor's craft is founded on real interest in people. There are two things to remember in creating a character: how a man looks and how he feels."

In his first film, Malleson had an uncredited role as an unfortunate chap who is thrown out of a moving car – a stunt that the actor performed himself. Despite this inauspicious beginning, even a quick run through Malleson’s cinema resume is like a lineup of the most endearing usual suspects. He was the hookah-smoking Thaddeus Sholto in the Sherlock Holmes mystery The Sign of Four (1932), the childlike Sultan of The Thief of Baghdad (1940), a jovial hearse driver in the spooky anthology film Dead of Night (1945), an executioner with a penchant for poesy in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), the inebriated Mr. Fortesque in Hitchcock’s Stage Fright (1950), the junk shop proprietor Old Joe in the Christmas classic Scrooge (1951) and the doddering Canon Chausable in The Importance of Being Earnest (1952). For Hammer Films, Malleson contributed a run of unforgettable character bits – a befuddled undertaker in Dracula (US: Horror of Dracula, 1958), a helpful (but not much) clergyman in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959), a provincial doctor who doses himself with prophylactic tinctures in The Brides of Dracula (1960) and an affable cabman in The Phantom of the Opera (1964). Malleson also made appearances in I’m All Right Jack (1959), Circus World (1964), the Miss Marple mystery Murder Ahoy (1964) and First Men in the Moon (1965). He is credited as a writer on three dozen feature films including Nell Gwyn (1934), Victoria the Great (1937) and The Thief of Baghdad. On a personal note, Malleson was thrice married, twice to actresses.

Part of Malleson’s shtick in Peeping Tom was his unnamed character’s dodgy eyesight, a bit of comic business sadly drawn from life. Going blind, Malleson retired from acting after playing a small role in Michael Winner’s You Must Be Joking! (1965). He died four years later at the age of 80.

Midway through his distinguished career, Miles Malleson reflected thoughtfully on the actor’s life. “It seems that drama is such a passing business. A performance is given, a picture screened, then, probably, forgotten. Only occasionally do you hear that something is remembered, and then you feel you may have added a little to the knowledge about the stuff of life."