#THE COURT JESTER SIR BROCKHURST MOVIE#
Rutland in the Hitchcock movie Marnie (1964). He performed in two Shakespearean films: the Orson Welles Macbeth (1948), in which he played a priest that Welles added to the story, who spoke lines originally uttered by other characters, and MGM's Julius Caesar (1953), as Cicero. He also played the vicious Earl of Warwick in Joan of Arc (1948). In The Song of Bernadette (1943), he played the ethically questionable psychiatrist who is hired to declare Bernadette mentally ill.
He appeared in such films as Random Harvest (1942), Cat People (1942), and The Uninvited (1944). There he spent time with such people as James Whale, a fellow ex-Oxford Player. Though his film career had begun in Britain in the 1930s, he had very little success before the cameras until he joined the British expatriate community in Hollywood in 1941. He made his American stage debut as the romantic lead opposite Gladys George in Lady in Waiting. Napier described himself as having a particular affinity for the work of George Bernard Shaw, and in 1937 appeared in a London revival of Heartbreak House supervised by Shaw himself. Napier performed for ten years (1929–1939) on the West End stage. Fagan realized that Napier was even taller than Guthrie when he stood up, but honoured his commitment. Napier was interviewed (and accepted) as Guthrie's replacement while sitting down. Fagan had dismissed Tyrone Guthrie because he was too tall for most parts. As Napier recalled, his “ridiculously tall” 6′ 6″ height played a crucial part in his securing the position and also almost losing it. He was engaged by the Oxford Players, where he worked with the likes of John Gielgud and Robert Morley.
He was educated at Packwood Haugh School and, after leaving Clifton College, he studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, graduating in 1925. Napier was a first cousin-once removed of Neville Chamberlain, Britain's prime minister from 1937 to 1940.
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