Gregory William Mank - Hollywood’s Maddest Doctors: Lionel Atwill, Colin Clive, and George Zucco

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Hollywoods Maddest Doctors: Lionel Atwill, Colin Clive, and George Zucco

2018 Gregory William Mank. All Rights Reserved.

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Acknowledgments: John Antosiewicz Photo Archives, Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters, Betty Cavanaugh, Wayne Shipley, Linda J. Walter, Tom Weaver.

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Table of Contents

They were three English gentlemen, all fated for Hollywood fame and tragedy.

One was an aristocrat, a London and Broadway matinee idol, who gleefully gave up the stage after marrying a multi-millionairess. This cat-eyed voluptuary reveled in becoming Hollywoods most Satanic villain. In 1933, Lionel Atwill spoke to a female interviewer about his own dramatic heroes:

Richard the Third, that deformed man, with his horrible attitude toward women, his lust for killing and then more killing and Hamlet, with his pitiful diseased mind, his ability to conjure up nightmare pictures of his mother and uncle

There was the would-be British soldier, a descendant of the legendary Clive of India (famous statesman and suicide). A Jekyll and Hyde alcoholic destined for an early death, he was described by his Frankenstein leading lady Mae Clarke as the most handsome man I ever saw, and also the saddest, and won notoriety (at least onscreen) as Hollywoods greatest sado-masochist. In 1931, the spectacularly self-destructive Colin Clive claimed his major attraction to the role of Frankenstein was that he died in the end:

I, in the title role, am killed by the Monster that I have createdproducers generally prefer that the play end happily with the hero and heroine clasped in each others arms.

And the third man was a World War I veteran, severely wounded in France, masterfully disguising his withered arm and crippled fingers as he acted in dozens of plays and nearly 100 movies; a gentleman whose favorite author was Dickens, and who himself was so kind and charming that, as a colleague remembered, He could have played God! He was a loving family man who never made peace with his wicked screen image. As George Zucco lamented in the early 1940s:

Im Hollywoods unhappiest actor, because Im always cast as an evil, bloodletting old man.

Each man won glory on the stage, tasted the pleasures of Hollywoods golden age and faced bitter finales. Atwill hosted what legend calls a Christmas Eve Orgy, a night that exploded into a scandal of classic proportion and warped what was left of his career. Clive died almost a decade before Atwill, finding his own Frankenstein Monster in the bottle. And Zucco outlasted both his peers, but spent most of his final decade in a sanitarium (which the retellings of Hollywood mythology would dramatize into a madhouse).

Their backgrounds were strikingly similar. Atwill and Zucco were London toddlers when the Jack the Ripper killings terrorized Whitechapel in 1888. Clive and Zucco came to prominence on the same January, 1929 date as a West End opening night audience cheered the curtain call of Journeys End, directed by James Whale (who would partake of his own Hollywood fame and tragedy). Each of the three men was a highly praised stage star; indeed, Atwill was second only to John Barrymore as the most acclaimed Great Actor of Broadway in the 1920s.

Each approached Hollywood villainy in his own distinct, colorful way. For Lionel Atwill, the leer was the thing; he was rather the thinking mans horror star, keen to suggest all variety of sex and depravity. Thus, Murders in the Zoo, a wild and woolly 1933 pre-Code shocker in which Atwill feeds his (implied) nymphomaniacal wife (Kathleen Burke) to a pool of highly appreciative alligators, might be his definitive performance. (More famous is his wonderful one-armed Inspector Krogh of Son of Frankenstein, but thats a sympathetic portrayal at least for Atwill.)

For Colin Clive, his apocalyptic Its Alive!, exulted over Karloffs moving hand in Frankenstein s Gothic watchtower, is one of the great magic moments of the movies. Mae Clarke of Frankenstein claimed Clive had the face of Christ, and he gave his portrayals a crown-of-thorns intensity and anguish that made him almost painful to watch; always we felt the torment. In History Is Made at Night, one of his final films, the dying Clive gives his role of the demonically jealous husband a baroque zeal thats remarkably chilling. The true angst that spilled into his performances make him an icon of obsession, and theres a small (but wildly devoted) cult out there which reveres him with a passion that exceeds even the most out-on-the-edge Lugosi covens.

And as for George Zuccoif he were Hollywoods unhappiest actor, one never would have guessed it in his horror films. How those eyes lit up like possessed pinballs whenever he did his best/worst in the movies! Unlike Atwill (who seemed to get a kinky kick out of his more aberrant villains), or Clive (who likely saw his own self-immolation in them), Zucco managed to be Machiavellian via Olympian professionalism. His best villains had a depth, a sophistication; his mad Dr. Morris of The Mad Ghoul, motivated by unrequited love for Evelyn Ankers, might be his finest hour of villainy (even if hes best remembered by many as the smoldering old high priest of Universals Mummy series). One can ride up lovely Mandeville Canyon in Los Angeles, where Zuccos ranch used to be, and imagine the actor happily leaving all his movie mayhem behind as he looked forward to seeing his beloved wife and daughter and the familys many pets.

Their paths would cross in bizarre ways in Hollywood. Atwill would replace Clive in films twice in his career, including taking over for him in Lancer Spy, which Clive was making at the time of his death. Just so, Zucco would replace Atwill in Scared to Death, a film Atwill had reportedly signed for (but was too ill to begin) at the end of his life.

All are long gone. Their old houses still stand in the hills of Hollywood. The ashes of the cat-eyed voluptuary have been in vaultage below a Los Angeles crematorium for over 50 years, never claimed by his last wife or son. The ashes of the man with the tormented Jekyll and Hyde nature reportedly were never claimed, and now might be lost. Only the ashes of the third man, once Hollywoods unhappiest actor, rest in a niche in a Los Angeles cemetery. Some say all three spirits haunt Hollywood.

They certainly haunt film history.

Gregory William Mank

December, 1998