Frank Vosper

Frank Vosper born 15 December 1899 (d. 1937)

Frank Vosper was a British actor and playwright.

Frank Vosper was bitten by the acting bug as a boy and at the age of 17 he attended the F R Benson and afterwards the Ben Greet Players instead of a college. Vosper made his stage debut in 1919 and was best known for playing urbane villains.

After first roles on stages he served in World War I but was lucky to be employed by Captain Basil Dean's entertainment unit. His experiences there underpinned his intention to learn the profession of an actor seriously. After the war he soon became established on British stages where he often impersonated old men at the beginning of his career.

He made his silent film debut in 1926 and wrote his first play in 1927

His extensive stage experience included appearing in his own play Love from a Stranger (1936), adapted from the short story Philomel Cottage by Agatha Christie.

His other plays included co-writing the comedy No Funny Business. He also wrote People Like Us, based on the case of Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters. Originally banned by the Lord Chamberlain, it remained unperformed until 1948 when it premiered at the Wyndhams Theatre, London.

He experienced the height of his career in the 1930s and was highly esteemed as an actor as well as a playwright. His best-known films include Rome Express (1932), Red Ensign (1934) directed by Michael Powell, Jew Süss (34), Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) where he impersonated the assassin, Royal Cavalcade (1935) and Spy of Napoleon (1936).

After a holiday to Jamaica in 1936 Vosper went to New York to order to help to set up one of his plays for the theatre. On the way back to London the unthinkable happened.

He died on March 6, 1937 when he was drowned after falling from the transatlantic liner SS Paris. On the final night of the voyage Vosper attended a party for the English beauty queen, Muriel Oxford; leaving the party early he was never seen again. The death was eventually ruled as accidental after considerable media speculation as to the cause of the death. There is a school of thought that Vosper killed himself; in his autobiography Flaws In the Glass, the Australian author and playwright Patrick White remarks that Vosper is said to have 'thrown himself off a liner after finding his male lover flirting with a beauty queen.'

It appears that Vosper, like many others in the theatre at the time, was well known to be homosexual, in certain circles at least. In his play The Green Bay Tree, which was popular in gay circles of the time, a gay aristocrat picks up a working class boy and models him in his own image.