Career Highlights: Bulldog Drummond, The Dark Angel, The Grand Duchess and the Waiter
First Major Screen Credit: The Grand Duchess and the Waiter (1926)
Biography
Veteran British stage actor Lawrence Grant entered films in 1918, when his marked resemblance to Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm made him a "natural" for such epics as To Hell with the Kaiser. An acknowledged expert in American Indian lore, Grant also took time in 1918 to produce an experimental color film about Native Americans. Sound proved no obstacle to Grant's film career, as he proved in his first talkie role, the scurrilous Dr. Lakington in Bulldog Drummond (1929). He later appeared with his Drummond co-star Ronald Colman in such films as The Unholy Garden (1931) and Lost Horizon (1937). Usually a villain, Grant enjoyed a sizeable sympathetic role as Sir Lionel Barton, the luckless aristocrat tortured to death by the insidious Boris Karloff, in The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932). Active until 1945, Lawrence Grant could be seen in minor roles (often unbilled) in such horror efforts as Ghost of Frankenstein (1942) and The Living Ghost (1944). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
In addition to his regular shifts on Radio 3 itself, Lawrence was the host of Radio 3's Saturday night program on the CBC Radio Two network until March 17, 2007, when that program was discontinued. He is also regular host of the service's weekly podcast, which is the most widely downloaded Canadian podcast on the Internet as of 2006. Spin magazine dubbed it the best podcast in Canada.[1]
Lawrence began his association with the CBC in the 1990s, filing stories about life on tour with the Smugglers for David Wisdom's show Nightlines. When Nightlines ended in 1997, Wisdom and Leora Kornfeld, the former host of Realtime, went on to host the new series RadioSonic. Lawrence initially worked for the show as a researcher, and later became a producer. He became host of RadioSonic in 2001, after Wisdom and Kornfeld left the program.
Lawrence co-founded and currently plays ice hockey for the Vancouver Flying Vees, an amateur hockey team staffed largely by Canadian musicians.[2]