Though he frequently adopted a British accent, actor Gavin Muir was a Chicago boy. After stage work, Muir went to Hollywood for Mary of Scotland (1936), then spent the next quarter century menacing various stars as sly, slow-speaking villains. His indeterminate nationality made him useful in war films like The Master Race (1945), while his tendency to look as though he was hiding some awful secret enabled him to shine in such melodramas as Nightmare (1942). A more benign but still not altogether above-board Muir appeared in the role of a scientist coerced into inflicting invisibility upon Arthur Franz in Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951). As late as 1959, Muir was throwing roadblocks in the way of sweetness 'n' light as a snooty butler on TV's The Betty Hutton Show. Gavin Muir's last film before slipping into retirement was Night Tide (1963), an appropriately glum ghost story.
by Hal Erickson
biography
