Rambunctious British leading man (contrary to popular belief, he was of
Scottish ancestry, not Irish) and later character actor primarily in
American films, Victor McLaglen was a vital presence in a number of
great motion pictures, especially those of director
John Ford. McLaglen (pronounced
Muh-clog-len, not Mack-loff-len) was the son of the Right Reverend
Andrew McLaglen, a Protestant clergyman who was at one time Bishop of
Claremont in South Africa. The young McLaglen, eldest of eight
brothers, attempted to serve in the Boer War by joining the Life
Guards, though his father secured his release. The adventuresome young
man traveled to Canada where he did farm labor and then directed his
pugnacious nature into professional prizefighting. He toured in
circuses, vaudeville shows, and Wild West shows, often as a fighter
challenging all comers. His tours took him to the US, Australia (where
he joined in the gold rush) and South Africa. In 1909 he was the first
fighter to box newly-crowned heavyweight champion
Jack Johnson, whom he fought
in a six-round exhibition match in Vancouver (as an exhibition fight,
it had no decision). When the First World War broke out, McLaglen
joined the Irish Fusiliers and soldiered in the Middle East, eventually
serving as Provost Marshal (head of Military Police) for the city of
Baghdad. After the war he attempted to resume a boxing career, but was
given a substantial acting role in
The Call of the Road (1920)
and was well received. He became a popular leading man in British
silent films, and within a few years was offered the lead in an
American film,
The Beloved Brute (1924). He
quickly became a most popular star of dramas as well as action films,
playing tough or suave with equal ease. With the coming of sound, his
ability to be persuasively debonair diminished by reason of his native
speech patterns, but his popularity increased, particularly when cast
by Ford as the tragic Gypo Nolan in
The Informer (1935), for which
McLaglen won the Best Actor Oscar. He continued to play heroes,
villains and simple-minded thugs into the 1940s, when Ford gave his
career a new impetus with a number of lovably roguish Irish parts in
such films as
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949)
and The Quiet Man (1952). The
latter film won McLaglen another Oscar nomination, the first time a
Best Actor winner had been nominated subsequently in the Supporting
category. McLaglen formed a semi-militaristic riding and polo club, the
Light Horse Brigade, and a similarly arrayed precision motorcycle team,
the Victor McLaglen Motorcycle Corps, both of which led to apparently
erroneous conclusions that he had fascist sympathies and was forming
his own private army. The facts prove otherwise, and despite rumors to
the contrary, McLaglen did not espouse the far right-wing sentiments
often attributed to him. He continued to act in films into his 70s and
died, from heart failure, not long after appearing in a film directed
by his son, Andrew V. McLaglen.
