Career Highlights: I See a Dark Stranger, Bottoms Up, The Dam Busters
First Major Screen Credit: A Voice in the Night (1941)
Biography
Actor Raymond Huntley made his first professional appearance with the Birmingham Repertory at age 18. In 1927, Huntley played the title character in the original London production of Dracula; he tested for the film version, but lost out to Bela Lugosi. Top-billed in his stage efforts, Huntley's film career was largely limited to supporting roles. He played many a Nazi and/or fascist during the war years, then portrayed an abundance of condescending officials, brusque business executives and club-car boors. On television, Raymond Huntley gained worldwide fame as lawyer Geoffrey Dillon on Upstairs Downstairs; he was also featured as Emmanuel Holroyd in the 1973 British TV comedy series That's Your Funeral. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Huntley has been credited as the first actor to portray Count Dracula, but that is incorrect. Huntley was first to play the role in Hamilton Deane's stage adaptation, later revised by John L. Balderston and now the most successful stage version of Bram Stoker's novel. The very first stage performance of Dracula occurred in 1897, shortly after the novel was published; Stoker himself mounted a one-off dramatization of the novel at Sir Henry Irving's Lyceum Theatre in London, where Stoker was manager.
In Huntley's later years, he became well known on television as Sir Geoffrey Dillon, the family solicitor to the Bellamys in LWT's popular 1970s drama series Upstairs, Downstairs.
Huntley died in the Westminster Hospital, London in 1990