Career
Gwenn appeared in more than eighty films during his career, including the Greer Garson/Laurence Olivier version of Pride and Prejudice (1940), Cheers for Miss Bishop, Of Human Bondage, and The Keys of the Kingdom. George Cukor's Sylvia Scarlett (1935) marked his first appearance in a Hollywood film, as Katharine Hepburn's father; - his final British film, as a capitalist trying to take over a family brewery in Cheer Boys Cheer (1939) is credited with being the first authentic Ealing comedy. He settled in Hollywood in 1940 and became part of its British colony. He is perhaps best remembered for his role as Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Upon receiving his Oscar, he said "Now I know there is a Santa Claus!" According to the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) he is the only person to win an acting Academy Award for playing the role of Santa Claus. He received a second nomination for his role in Mister 880 (1950). Near the end of his career he played one of the main roles in Alfred Hitchcock's The Trouble with Harry (1955). He has a small but hugely memorable role as a Cockney assassin in another American Hitchcock film, Foreign Correspondent (1940), the year he moved to Hollywood. He is one of many actors whose Hollywood careers were helped by Hitchcock.
In theatre, he starred in a 1942 production on Broadway of Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters, which also starred Judith Anderson and Ruth Gordon. It was produced by and starred Katherine Cornell. Time magazine proclaimed it "a dream production by anybody's reckoning — the most glittering cast the theatre has seen, commercially, in this generation."
In 1954, Gwenn played Dr. Harold Medford in the classic science fiction film Them! with James Arness and James Whitmore.
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