Reginald Denny (actor)

Reginald Leigh Dugmore (20 November 1891 – 16 June 1967), known professionally as Reginald Denny, was an English actor, aviator, and UAV pioneer.

Born Reginald Leigh Dugmore on 20 November 1891 in Richmond, Surrey, England (part of Greater London since 1965), he came from a theatrical family; his father was actor and opera singer W.H. Denny.

In 1899, he began his stage career in A Royal Family and starred in several London productions from age seven to twelve. He attended St. Francis Xavier College in Mayfield, Sussex, later known as Mayfield College, but, at 16, he ran away from school to train as a pugilist with Sir Harry Preston at the National Sporting Club. He also appeared in several British stage productions touring the music halls of England of The Merry Widow.

In 1911, he went to the United States to appear in Henry B. Harris's stage production of The Quaker Girl, then joined the Bandmann Opera Company as a baritone touring India and the Far East India where he performed for Krishna Raja Wadiyar IV.^{[citation needed]}

Although he worked in "flickers" during 1911 and 1912, Reginald officially began his film career in 1915 with the World Film Company and made films both in the United States and Britain until the 1960s. Among the numerous stage productions in which he starred, Reginald appeared in John Barrymore's 1920 Broadway production of Richard III; the two actors became friends and starred in several films together including Sherlock Holmes (1922), Hamlet (1933), Romeo and Juliet (1936), and Paramount's Bulldog Drummond series (1937–1938). ^{[citation needed]}

Denny was a well-known actor in silent films, and with the advent of talkies he became a character actor. He played the lead role in a number of his earlier films, generally as a comedic Englishman in such works as Private Lives (1931) and later had reasonably steady work as a supporting actor in dozens of films, including The Little Minister (1934) with Katharine Hepburn, Anna Karenina (1935) with Greta Garbo, Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940) and the Frank Sinatra crime caper film Assault on a Queen (1966). He made frequent appearances in television during the 1950s and 1960s. His last role was in Batman (1966) as Commodore Schmidlapp. In 2020, Kino Lorber released 4K restorations on DVD and Blu-ray of three of Denny's silent comedies: The Reckless Age, Skinner's Dress Suit, and What Happened to Jones? in The Reginald Denny Collection.

Denny served as an observer/gunner during the First World War in the new wartime Royal Air Force.

In the 1920s he performed as a stunt pilot with the 13 Black Cats aerial stunt team and loaned his World War I Sopwith Snipe biplane to Howard Hughes for use in Hell's Angels (1927). In the early 1930s, Denny became interested in free-flight model airplanes. In 1934, he and oil tycoon Max Whittier's son, Paul Whittier, formed Reginald Denny Industries and opened a model plane shop, which became a chain known as the Reginald Denny Hobby Shop, now California Hobby Distributors.