British actor Richard Wordsworth was primarily a theater actor across a career of 40 years. Interspersed among his stage work, however, were some three dozen or so movie and television performances, in everything from 1950s mini-series adaptations of Dickens (Newman Noggs in Nicholas Nickleby; Mr. Gashford in Barnaby Rudge) to the 1970 international film release of Song of Norway (as Hans Christian Andersen). But it was in science fiction and horror that Wordsworth cut his most memorial on-screen figure, for his work in three of those films. Born in Halesowen, Worcestershire, England in 1915, he was the great-great-grandson of the poet William Wordsworth, and initially set out for a career in the church, until he was bitten by the acting bug. Wordsworth's intense eyes and resonant voice made him a natural for a stage career, though not necessarily for traditional leading man roles -- he specialized in classical theatrical roles during the first decade or so of his career, and enjoyed a huge success as well in 1959 in the musical Lock Up Your Daughters. Television and film were little more than an adjunct to his theater work; he made his first small-screen appearance in 1952, and over the next two years portrayed such parts as Tybalt (Romeo And Juliet in BBC productions. In 1955, Wordsworth made his big-screen debut in the most memorable role of his career -- a role for which, ironically, he barely had a chance to use his voice at all -- as stricken astronaut Victor Caroon in Val Guest's The Quatermass Experiment. In a cast that included American star Brian Donlevy and British star Jack Warner, Wordsworth managed to steal every scene he was in without uttering a single word of dialogue, using little more than his eyes.
Wordsworth's film and television appearances were few and far-between up through his retirement in 1989, but also included Hammer Films' The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958) and a memorable speaking role in Curse of the Werewolf (1961). He also appeared in such important non-genre movies as Joseph Losey's Time Without Pity (1957). Wordsworth retired in 1989 and passed away in 1993. During his final decade, he wrote and toured with a one-man show entitled The Bliss of Solitude, dealing with the life and work of his ancestor William Wordsworth.
