Guy Rolfe: From Parapets to Puppet Master

Screen actor John Rolfe (1911-2003) was a sort of second tier version of stars like Basil Rathbone and Peter Cushing, who appeared in historical dramas and literary adaptations during the cinema’s classic era, and horror films in later years.

I was amused to note him while watching him as Prince John in Ivanhoe (1952) opposite Robert Taylor, for the name “Guy Rolfe”, sounds if anything like the name of a character in Ivanhoe, or some other Medieval English story. (Rathbone, for example, had played Sir Guy of Gisborne in 1938’s Robin Hood). Our man’s real given name was Edwin Arthur, but the Rolfe surname was genuinely his, and that IS also the stuff of historical legend, for it was John Rolfe who settled in Jamestown and married Pocahontas. Guy can’t have been one of his descendants (as I’ve seen claimed) for he was born and raised in London, but they surely shared a common ancestor. Young Guy Rolfe had been a professional race car driver and a boxer before settling into acting in the mid 1930s. In addition to Ivanhoe, he was in such other period pictures as Young Bess (1953), The Veils of Bagdad (1953), King of the Khyber Rifles (1953), TheStranglers of Bombay (1959), The Barbarians (1960), King of Kings (1961) and The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964).

Much like Charles Laughton in Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd (1952), and Basil Rathbone opposite Danny Kaye in The Court Jester (1955), Rolfe also poked fun of the genre he was associated with in Snow White and The Three Stooges (1961). Like Rathbone, Cushing and Christopher Lee, he played Sherlock Holmes (in 1984’s The Caseof Marcel Duchamp). He was also in the 1965 Hercule Poirot adaptation The Alphabet Murders.

And yet we have not yet gotten to the role he is probably best known for today:

In 1961 Rolfe played the title role in William Castle’s horror classic Mr. Sardonicus, and this proved to set the tone for the final years of his career. He later went on to appear in the Amicus film And Now the Screaming Starts (1973); TheBride (1985, a remake of Bride of Frankenstein); Stuart Gordon’s Dolls (1987); and several films in the Puppet Master franchise (1991-99) as the lead character André Toulon.

After Rolfe’s passing some earlier footage was used in one of the posthumous Puppet Master films, but honestly, if the producers truly had any vision, there was a much more horrible method of putting the deceased actor in one of these movies, completely in keeping with the film series’ premise. Mark my words. it’s only a matter of time before such a thing happens.