Early films and acting Cushing eventually applied for a scholarship at the
Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. His first audition was before the actor
Allan Aynesworth, who was so unimpressed with Cushing's manner of speech that he rejected him outright and insisted he not return until he improved his
diction. Cushing continued to pursue a scholarship, writing twenty-one letters to the school, By the end of the summer of 1936, Cushing accepted a job with the
repertory theatre company
Southampton Rep, working as assistant stage manager and performing in bit roles at the Grand Theatre in the
Hampshire city. While he was in Southampton, he met an 18-year-old fellow actor,
Doreen Lawrence, and they were engaged to be married. Lawrence broke off the engagement, citing his frequent crying and bringing his parents on dates. Soon, he felt the urge to pursue a film career in the United States. In 1939, his father bought him a one-way ticket to Hollywood, where he moved with only £50 to his name. Cushing was hired as a
stand-in for scenes that featured both characters played by
Louis Hayward, who had the
dual lead roles of King Louis XIV and Philippe of
Gascony. Cushing played one part against Hayward in one scene, then the opposite part in another, and ultimately the scenes were spliced together in a
split screen process that featured Hayward in both parts and left Cushing's work cut from the film altogether. The small role involved
sword-fighting and, although Cushing had no experience with
fencing, he told Whale he was an excellent fencer to ensure he got the part. Cushing later said his unscreened scenes alongside Hayward were terrible performances, but that his experience on the film provided an excellent opportunity to learn and observe how filming on a studio set worked. Around this time the actor
Robert Coote, who met Cushing during a cricket game, recommended to the director
George Stevens that Cushing might be good for a part in Stevens' upcoming film
Vigil in the Night (1940). Adapted from a
serial novella
of the same name, it was a
drama film about a nurse played by
Carole Lombard working in a poorly-equipped country hospital. Stevens cast Cushing in the second male lead role of Joe Shand, the husband of the Lombard character's sister. Shooting ran from September to November 1939, and the film was released in 1940, drawing Cushing's first semblance of attention and critical praise. Despite the promise, however, Cushing grew homesick and decided he wished to return to England. He moved to New York City in anticipation of his eventual return home, during which time he voiced a few
radio commercials and joined a
summer stock theatre company to raise money for his voyage back to England. He performed in such plays as
Robert E. Sherwood's
The Petrified Forest,
Arnold Ridley's
The Ghost Train,
S. N. Behrman's
Biography and a
modern dress version of
William Shakespeare's
Macbeth. He was eventually noticed by a Broadway theatre talent scout, and in 1941 he made his Broadway debut in the religious wartime drama
The Seventh Trumpet. It received poor reviews, however, and ran for only eleven days. In 1942, the
Noël Coward play
Private Lives was touring the military stations and hospitals in the
British Isles, and the actor playing the lead role of Elyot Chase was called to service. Cushing agreed to take his place with very little notice or time to prepare, and earned a salary of ten pounds a week for the job. During this tour he met Violet Hélène "Helen" Beck, a former dancer who was starring in the lead female role of Amanda Prynne. They fell in love and were married on 10 April 1943. Cushing eventually had to leave ENSA due to
lung congestion, an ailment his wife helped him recover from. The war years continued to prove difficult for him, however, and at one point he was forced to work designing ladies
head-scarves at a
Macclesfield-based silk manufacturer to make ends meet. Nearing middle age and finding it increasingly harder to make a living in acting, Cushing began to consider himself a failure.
Hamlet won the
Academy Award for Best Picture, and earned Cushing praise for his performance. Cushing designed custom hand-scarves in honour of the
Hamlet film, and as it was being exhibited across England, the scarves were eventually accepted as gifts by
the Queen and her daughter
Princess Elizabeth.
Success in television and major films Cushing struggled greatly to find work over the next few years, and became so stressed that he felt he was suffering from an extended
nervous breakdown. Among them was the
John Huston film
Moulin Rouge (1952) in which he played a racing spectator named Marcel de la Voisier appearing with
José Ferrer, who played the artist
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Other successful television ventures during this time included
Epitaph for a Spy (1953),
The Noble Spaniard,
Beau Brummell, and
Anastasia, the latter of which won Cushing the
Daily Mail National Television Award for Best Actor of 1953–54. In the two years following
Nineteen Eighty-Four, Cushing appeared in thirty-one television plays and two serials, and won Best Television Actor of the Year from the
Evening Chronicle. He also won best actor awards from the
Guild of Television Producers in 1955, and from the
British Academy of Film and Television Arts in 1956. Among the plays he appeared in during this time were
Terence Rattigan's
The Browning Version,
Gordon Daviot's Richard of Bordeaux, and the production of
Nigel Kneale's
The Creature (1955), Despite this continued success in live television, Cushing found the medium too stressful and wished to return to film. Nevertheless, he continued to work in some film roles during this period, including the
adventure film The Black Knight (1954) opposite
Alan Ladd. He also starred in the film adaptation of the
Graham Greene novel
The End of the Affair (1955) as Henry Miles, an important civil servant and the
cuckolded husband of Sarah Miles, played by
Deborah Kerr.
Hammer Frankenstein films in
Revenge of Frankenstein During a brief quiet period following Cushing's television work, he read in
trade publications about
Hammer, a low-budget production company seeking to adapt
Mary Shelley's
horror novel Frankenstein into a new film. He later said that his career decisions entailed selecting roles where he knew that he would be accepted by the audience. "Who wants to see me as
Hamlet? Very few. But millions want to see me as [Baron] Frankenstein, so that's the one I do." The film critic
Roger Ebert described Cushing's work in the Hammer films: "[Cushing is] the one in all those British horror films, standing between Vincent Price and Christopher Lee. His dialog usually runs along the lines of, 'But good heavens, man! The person you saw has been dead for more than two centuries! Unlike
Frankenstein (1931) produced by
Universal, the Hammer films revolved mainly around
Victor Frankenstein, rather than
his monster. The screenwriter
Jimmy Sangster wrote the protagonist as an ambitious, egotistical and coldly intellectual scientist who despised his contemporaries. Cushing so valued preparation for his role that he insisted on being trained by a surgeon to learn how to wield a
scalpel authentically. claiming it added a layer of distinction and credibility to the film. Many felt Cushing's performance helped create the
archetypal mad scientist character.
The Curse of Frankenstein was an overnight success, bringing both Cushing and Lee worldwide fame. The two men continued to work together in many films for Hammer, and their names became synonymous with the company. Cushing reprised the role of Baron Victor Frankenstein in five sequels. and
Frankenstein Created Woman (1967), in which the Frankenstein's monster is a woman played by the
Playboy magazine
centrefold model Susan Denberg. Cushing played the lead role twice more in
Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969) and
Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974). In
Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell, Cushing portrayed Frankenstein as having gone completely mad, in a fitting coda to the earlier films.
Hammer Dracula films When Hammer sought to adapt
Bram Stoker's classic
vampire novel
Dracula, they cast Cushing to play the vampire's adversary
Doctor Van Helsing. Cushing envisioned the character as an idealist warrior for the greater good, and studied the original book carefully and adapted several of Van Helsing's characteristics from the books into his performance, including the repeated gesture of raising his index finger to emphasise an important point. Cushing said one of the biggest challenges during filming was not missing whenever he struck a prop stake with a mallet and drove it into a vampire's heart.
Dracula was released in 1958, with Cushing once again starring opposite Lee, who played the
title character, although Cushing was given
top billing. During filming, Cushing himself suggested the staging for the final confrontation scene, in which Van Helsing leaps onto a large library table, opens window curtains to weaken Dracula with sunlight, then uses two candlesticks as a makeshift crucifix to drive the vampire into the sunlight. In 1959, Cushing agreed to reprise the role of Van Helsing in the sequel,
The Brides of Dracula (1960). Before filming began, however, Cushing said he had reservations about the screenplay written by Jimmy Sangster and Peter Bryan. As a result, the playwright
Edward Percy was brought in to make modifications to the script, though the rewrites pushed filming into early 1960 and brought additional costs to the production. For the sequel,
Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966), which marked Lee's return to the title role for the first time since 1958, Cushing granted permission for archival footage featuring him to be used in the opening scene, a reprisal of the climax from the first
Dracula film. In exchange, Hammer's James Carreras thanked Cushing by paying for extensive roofing repair work that had recently been done on Cushing's recently purchased
Whitstable home. Cushing appeared in
Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972), a Hammer modernisation of the Dracula story set in the then-present day. Lee once again starred as Dracula. In the opening scene Cushing portrays the nineteenth century Van Helsing as he did in the previous films, and the character is killed after battling Dracula. Thereafter the action jumps ahead to 1972, and Cushing plays the original character's grandson for the bulk of the movie. Cushing and Lee both reprised their respective roles in the sequel
The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1974), which was known in the United States as
Count Dracula and his Vampire Bride.
Other Hammer roles Although most well known for his roles in the
Frankenstein and
Dracula films, Cushing appeared in a wide variety of other Hammer productions during this time. Both he and his wife feared that he would become
typecast into horror roles, but he continued to take them because they guaranteed regular work. He appeared in the horror film
The Abominable Snowman (1957), a Hammer adaptation of a BBC Nigel Kneale television play
The Creature (1955) which Cushing had also starred in. He portrayed an English botanist searching the
Himalayas for the legendary
Yeti. Cushing and Lee appeared together in the Hammer horror
The Mummy (1959), with Cushing as the archaeologist John Banning and Lee as the antagonist
Kharis. Around the same time, he portrayed the detective
Sherlock Holmes in the Hammer production of
The Hound of the Baskervilles (also 1959), an adaptation of
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's novel of the same name. and reread the novels in anticipation of the role. Hammer decided to heighten the source novel's horror elements, which upset the estate of Conan Doyle, but Cushing himself voiced no objection to the creative licence because he felt the character of Holmes himself remained intact. However, when the producer
Anthony Hinds proposed removing the character's
deerstalker, Cushing insisted they should remain because audiences associated Holmes with his headgear and pipes. He prepared extensively for the role, studying the novel and taking notes in his script. He scrutinised the costumes and screenwriter Peter Bryan's script, often altering words or phrases. Lee later claimed to be awestruck by Cushing's ability to incorporate many different props and actions into his performance simultaneously, whether reading, smoking a pipe, drinking whiskey, filing through papers, or other things while portraying Holmes. In later years, Cushing considered his Holmes performance one of the finest accomplishments of his career. while the
Monthly Film Bulletin called him "tiresomely mannered and too lightweight" and
BBC Television's Barry Norman said he "didn't quite capture the air of know-all arrogance that was the great detective's hallmark".
The Hound of the Baskervilles was originally conceived as the first in a series of Sherlock Holmes films, but no sequels were made. The next year, Cushing starred as an
Ebenezer Scrooge-like manager of a bank being robbed in the Hammer
thriller film Cash on Demand (1961). He considered this among the favourites of his films, He and the director
Peter Graham Scott did not get along well during filming and at one point, when the two were having a disagreement on set, Cushing turned to a cameraman named Len Harris and said, "Take no notice, Len. We've done enough of these now to know what we're doing." Among his final Hammer roles was
Fear in the Night (1972), where he played a one-armed school headmaster apparently terrorising the protagonist, played by
Judy Geeson.
Non-Hammer film work Although best known for his Hammer performances from the 1950s to the 1970s, Cushing worked in a variety of other roles during this time, and actively sought roles outside the horror genre to diversify his work. Around the same time he appeared in the film
Alexander the Great (1956) as the
Athenian General
Memnon of Rhodes. He appeared in the biographical
epic film John Paul Jones (1959), in which
Robert Stack played the
title role of the American naval fighter in the
American Revolutionary War. Cushing played
Robert Knox in
The Flesh and the Fiends (1960), based on the true story of the doctor who purchased human corpses for research from the
serial killer duo
Burke and Hare. The film was called
Mania in its American release. Cushing appeared in several films released in 1961, including ''
Fury at Smugglers' Bay, an adventure film about pirates scavenging ships off the English coastline; The Hellfire Club, where he played a lawyer helping a young man expose a cult; and The Naked Edge'', a British-American thriller about a woman who suspects her husband framed another man for murder. The latter film starred Deborah Kerr, Cushing's co-star from
The End of the Affair, and
Gary Cooper, one of Cushing's favourite actors. Cushing took the lead role in two
science fiction films by AARU Productions based on the British television series
Doctor Who. Although Cushing's protagonist was derived from television scripts used for
First Doctor serials, his portrayal of the character differed in the fact that Cushing's
Dr. Who was a human being, whereas the original Doctor as portrayed on TV by
William Hartnell was extraterrestrial. Cushing played the role in
Dr. Who and the Daleks (1965) and ''
Daleks' Invasion Earth 2150 A.D. (1966). but he turned down the part in this series due to the extremely demanding filming schedule. Fourteen days of rehearsal was originally scheduled for each episode, but they were cut down to ten days for economic reasons. Many actors turned down the role as a result, but Cushing accepted, and the BBC believed his Hammer Studios persona would bring what they called a sense of "lurking horror and callous savagery" to the series. and Cushing adopted a strict regimen of training, preparation and exercise. He tried to keep his performance identical to his portrayal of Holmes from The Hound of the Baskervilles''. Although the series proved popular, Cushing felt he could not give his best performance under the hectic schedule, and he was not pleased with the final result. Cushing appeared in a handful of horror films by the independent
Amicus Productions, including ''
Dr. Terror's House of Horrors (1965), as a man who could see into the future using Tarot cards; The Skull (1965), as a professor who became possessed by a spiritual force embodied within a skull; and Torture Garden (1967), as a collector of Edgar Allan Poe relics who is robbed and murdered by a rival. Cushing also appeared in non-Amicus horror films like Island of Terror (1966) and The Blood Beast Terror (1968), in both of which he investigates a series of mysterious deaths. He appeared in Corruption'' (1968), a film that was billed as so horrific that "no woman will be admitted alone" into theatres to see it. Cushing played a surgeon who attempts to restore the beauty of his wife (played by
Sue Lloyd), whose face is horribly scarred in an accident. In July 1969, Cushing appeared as the
straight man in the
sketch comedy series
The Morecambe & Wise Show. In the skit, Cushing portrayed
King Arthur, while the other two gave comedic portrayals of characters like
Merlin and the knights of the
Round Table. Cushing continued to make occasional cameos in the series over the next decade, portraying himself desperately attempting to collect a payment for his previous acting appearance on the show. Cushing and Lee made cameos as their old roles of Frankenstein and Dracula in the comedy
One More Time (1970), which starred
Peter Lawford and
Sammy Davis Jr. The single scene took only one morning of filming, which Cushing agreed to after Davis asked him to do it as a favour. in
Horror Express (1972). They starred in twenty-two films together, including three
Dracula Hammer films. In 1971, Cushing contacted the
Royal National Institute for the Blind and offered to provide
voice acting for some of their audiobooks. They immediately accepted, and among the works Cushing recorded was
The Return of Sherlock Holmes, a collection of thirteen one-hour stories. He appeared alongside
Vincent Price in
Dr. Phibes Rises Again! (1972), a sequel to
The Abominable Dr. Phibes, and then co-starred with Price again in the film
Madhouse (1974).
And Now the Screaming Starts! (1973) For
Tales from the Crypt, an
anthology film made up of several horror segments, Cushing was offered the part of a ruthless businessman but did not like the part and turned down the role. Instead, Cushing asked to play Arthur Grymsdyke, a kind, working-class widower who gets along well with the local children, but falls subject to a
smear campaign by his snobbish neighbours. Eventually, the character is driven to commit suicide, but returns from the grave to seek revenge against his tormentors. After Cushing was cast in the role, several changes were made to the script at his suggestion. Originally, all of the character's lines were spoken aloud to himself, but Cushing suggested he should speak to a framed photograph of his deceased wife instead, and the director,
Freddie Francis, agreed. His performance in
Tales from the Crypt won him the Best Male Actor award at the 1971 French Convention of Fantasy Cinema in France. Another was
The Ghoul, where he played a former priest hiding his
cannibalistic son in an attic. That film marked the first occasion on Cushing worked with the producer
Kevin Francis, who worked in minor jobs at Hammer and had long aspired to work with Cushing, whom he admired deeply. They went on to make two other films together,
Legend of the Werewolf (1975) and
The Masks of Death (1984) with Cushing playing Sherlock Holmes once more. Cushing appeared in the television film
The Great Houdini (1976) as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes. Cushing also appeared in the horror film
The Uncanny (1977).
Star Wars The American filmmaker
George Lucas approached Cushing with the hopes of casting him in his upcoming space
fantasy film,
Star Wars. Since the film's primary antagonist,
Darth Vader, wore a mask throughout the entire film and his face was never visible, Lucas felt that a strong human villain character was necessary. This led him to write the character of
Grand Moff Tarkin: a high-ranking Imperial governor and commander of the planet-destroying battle station the
Death Star. Lucas felt a talented actor was needed to play the role and said Cushing was his first choice. However, Cushing has claimed that Lucas originally approached him to play the Jedi Master
Obi-Wan Kenobi and only decided to cast him as Tarkin instead after the two met. He said he would have preferred to play Kenobi rather than Tarkin but could not have done so because he was to be filming other roles when
Star Wars was shooting, and Tarkin's scenes took less time to film than those of the larger Kenobi role. Although he was not a particular fan of science fiction, Cushing accepted the part because he believed his audience would love
Star Wars and enjoy seeing him in the film. As a result, he was paid a larger daily salary than most of his fellow cast, earning £2,000 per day compared to weekly salaries of US$1,000 for
Mark Hamill, $850 for
Carrie Fisher, and $750 for
Harrison Ford, who played the protagonists
Luke Skywalker,
Princess Leia and
Han Solo. Cushing got along well with the entire cast, especially his old
Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell co-star
David Prowse, who physically portrayed Darth Vader, and Carrie Fisher, who was appearing in her first major role as Princess Leia. During rehearsals, Lucas originally planned for Tarkin and Vader to use a giant screen filled with computerized architectural representations of hallways to monitor the whereabouts of Skywalker, Solo, and Organa. Although the idea was abandoned before filming began, Cushing and Prowse rehearsed those scenes in a set built by the computer animation artist
Larry Cuba. The close-up shots of Cushing aboard the Death Star, shown right before the battlestation is destroyed, were actually extra footage taken from previously shot scenes with Cushing that did not make the final film. During production, Lucas decided to add those shots, along with
second unit footage of the Death Star gunners preparing to fire, to heighten the space battle scenes. When
Star Wars was first released in 1977, most preliminary advertisements touted Cushing's Tarkin as the primary antagonist of the film, not Vader; Cushing was extremely pleased with the final film, and he claimed his only disappointment was that Tarkin was killed and could not appear in the sequels. The film gave him the highest amount of visibility of his career and inspired younger audiences to watch his older films. For the film
Rogue One (2016),
computer-generated imagery (CGI) and digitally repurposed
archive footage were used to insert Cushing's likeness from the original movie over the face of the English actor
Guy Henry. Henry provided the on-set capture and voice work with the reference material augmented and mapped over his performance like a digital body-mask. Cushing's estate-owners were heavily involved with the creation, which took place more than twenty years after Cushing died. This extensive use of CGI to "resurrect" an actor who had died many years earlier created a great deal of controversy about the ethics of using a deceased actor's likeness. Joyce Broughton, Cushing's former secretary, had approved recreating Cushing in the film. After attending the London premiere, she was reportedly "taken aback" and "dazzled" with the effect of seeing him on screen again.
Later career Towards the end of his career, Cushing performed in films and roles critics widely considered below his talent. Cushing appeared alongside his old co-stars Lee and
Vincent Price in
House of the Long Shadows (1983), a horror-
parody film featuring
Desi Arnaz Jr. as an author trying to write a gothic novel in a deserted Welsh mansion. The final notable roles of Cushing's career were in the comedy
Top Secret! (1984), the fantasy film
Sword of the Valiant (also 1984) and the adventure film
Biggles: Adventures in Time (1986). Also that year, a sketch Cushing drew of Sherlock Holmes was accepted as the official logo of the Northern Musgraves Sherlock Holmes Society. Cushing wrote two autobiographies,
Peter Cushing: An Autobiography (1986) and
Past Forgetting: Memoirs of the Hammer Years (1988). Cushing also wrote a children's book called
The Bois Saga, a story based on the history of England. Published in 1994, it was originally written specifically for the daughter of Cushing's long-time secretary and friend Joyce Broughton, to help her overcome reading problems resulting from her
dyslexia. It was Broughton who encouraged Cushing to have the book published. His final acting job was narrating, along with Christopher Lee, the Hammer Films documentary
Flesh and Blood: The Hammer Heritage of Horror (1994), which was recorded only a few weeks before his death. Produced by the American writer and director Ted Newsom, his contribution was recorded in
Canterbury, near his home. Lee recognised Cushing's health was fading and did his best to keep his friend's spirits up, but Lee later claimed he had a premonition that it would be the last time he saw Cushing alive, which proved to be true. ==Personal life==