Bramwell Fletcher on AllMovie

After a brief stint as an insurance clerk, British actor Bramwell Fletcher took to the stage, making his theatrical debut with the Shakespeare Memorial Company in 1927. After making his first London-produced film in 1928, Fletcher appeared on Broadway in 1929, and like many actors who could "talk British" he was spirited away to Hollywood during the earliest days of the sound-film boom. Fletcher went from actor to "type" in Hollywood, portraying slightly callow Englishmen in such pictures as Will Rogers' So This is London (1930) and the Ronald Colman version of Raffles (1930). Acting in the company of Katharine Hepburn and John Barrymore in A Bill of Divorcement (1932), poor Fletcher all but vanished from view, so it's little wonder that he sought the more fulfilling environs of the theatre. With his first wife Helen Chandler, Fletcher toured in several plays, notably Noel Coward's Tonight at 8:30, and after leaving movies for good and all in 1943, he worked uninterruptedly in both theatre and television. In 1965, the actor scored a critical success in Broadway's The Bernard Shaw Story, which he also wrote. Despite his thespic accomplishments, Fletcher earned his niche in Hollywood history for two things, one private, one public. The "private" thing was his second marriage to the tragic Diana Barrymore, a union later dramatized in the 1958 movie Too Much Too Soon, wherein Fletcher's name was changed to "Vincent Bryant" and he was played by the most un-Fletcherlike Efrem Zimbalist Jr. The public thing was Bramwell Fletcher's brief but unforgettable appearance in The Mummy (1932), in which, after being driven mad by the sight of a 3000-year-old mummy coming to life, Fletcher insanely giggles "It...it went for a little walk!"