Raymond Massey became so identified with Abraham Lincoln in both stage and screen performances that his good friend Noel Coward joked, “Ray won’t be happy until someone shoots him.” But Massey’s theatrical life story wasn’t confined to acting. Christopher Plummer wrote in the forward to Massey’s second volume of his autobiography, A Hundred Different Lives, “He has done everything there is to do around a theatre short of taking tickets.” Plummer was right. Massey acted, managed, produced, directed, and wrote for the theatre in both England and the United States from 1922 to 1976, when he voluntarily retired from the theatre. He was just shy of 80 when he made that decision.
 

Brother of Charles Vincent Massey, first Canadian-born Governor General of Canada, 1952-1959, Raymond Hart Massey, a fourth generation Canadian, was a diplomat of a different kind — a distinguished actor whose stage and screen appearances over half a century generated a genuine royal aura. Before turning professional at Londons Everyman Theatre in 1922, Massey had performed at Appleby College, Oakville, Ontario; Hart House Theatre, University of Toronto; and Oxford University. He acted with Sybil Thorndike in Saint Joan two years after turning professional and his presence as an actor on screen, stage and television lasted another half century. [Photo, courtesy Massey College Library]

Born to wealth and social position in Toronto in 1896 (his father was president of the family’s farm machinery company, Massey-Harris Company), Raymond was 26 before he actually entered theatrical life in England. By then he had been wounded and had suffered shell shock in World War I, had taught officer cadets at Yale University when the U.S. entered the war, and had served with the Canadian brigade sent in 1918 to Vladivostok, Siberia, to help the White Russians fight the Bolsheviks.

The 5,000 troops who went to Siberia encountered boredom rather than battle, however, and Massey, who had staged a skit in the officers’ mess, was asked to organize a full-length show to entertain the troops. He created a successful Minstrel Show and his performance in it further fired his ambition to be an actor. At Oxford University he played a few bit parts before returning to Canada to join the family firm where he started in the factory. Although hating this, he lasted almost a year before quitting and telling his father that he wanted to be an actor. His father approved his decision and offered a prayer “for my success and honesty as an actor...to avoid self conceit, to appear in good plays, and to abhor indecency in the theatre.”

In England, Raymond got his first walk-on part at the Everyman Theatre three weeks after his arrival in 1922 and acted in several more productions with Everyman in the next three years before taking over the lease of the theatre with two colleagues. One was a friend of George Bernard Shaw who allowed them to stage his productions for a 5 percent royalty instead of the 15 percent he normally demanded. As a result, they staged many Shaw plays, but, at the end of a year, the theatre was still hardly paying for itself and, with job offers available to all three of them in London’s West End, they left the Everyman.

Massey got his first leading role in 1927 and, in 1928, co-starred with Noel Coward in The Second Man. A year later, he was asked to direct Sean O’Casey’s The Silver Tassie, in which Barry Fitzgerald, then a part-time Abbey Theatre actor, had his first leading role. Massey was then asked to direct Somerset Maugham’s play, The Sacred Flame, which had failed in New York. After its London showing, however, Maugham wrote to Massey, “You brought out everything I had seen in the play when I wrote it and despaired because I could not get it in New York.”

In 1930 Raymond played Sherlock Holmes in The Speckled Band (his first of what would eventually be some 70 movies), acted in and directed numerous West End productions, and made his stage debut in New York as Hamlet in 1931. Robert Benchley suggested in a New Yorker review that he was “not enough of a ham.” His most important backstage visitor during the four-week run was not a critic, but playwright Robert Anderson, who asked if he would like to play a young Abe Lincoln. Responding positively, after Anderson completed his famous script, Abe Lincoln of Illinois, some seven years later Massey played his most triumphant role.

In the seven years between the meeting and the final script, Massey appeared in films that included The Scarlet Pimpernel with Leslie Howard, H.G. Wells’ Things to Come, The Prisoner of Zenda with Ronald Coleman, and Hurricane. He also took part in a number of stage productions as actor or director or both with such co-stars as his second wife, Adrienne Allen, Laurence Olivier, Gladys Cooper, and Ruth Gordon, but nothing quite measured up to the more than 150 reviews for his role as Abe Lincoln when it was staged in 1938. Even an editorial was written in the New York Daily News: it had earlier questioned using a Canadian actor for the part but conceded, two weeks later, “Mr. Massey in our opinion measures up to every requirement of the Lincoln role.”
 

Raymond Massey’s boyhood home in Toronto was this famous landmark at 519 Jarvis Street, just south of Bloor Street. From here, the great-grandson of Daniel Massey attended Havergal College (one of two boys in kindergarten); Toronto Model School, a boys’ public school attached to the provincial teachers’ college; Upper Canada College; St. Andrews; and, eventually, Appleby College in Oakville from which he matriculated in 1914 with honours. [Photo, courtesy Charles J. Humber Collection]

Massey went on tour, made the film version of the play, and became so identified with the role that there was concern he would never shake the Lincoln image. Katherine Cornell, however, came to the rescue when, in 1940, she invited him to co-star with her, first in England and then on Broadway, in her production of Shaw’s The Doctor’s Dilemma. They had known each other since their teens, having met when she visited an American uncle who had a summer home next to the Masseys’ in Cobourg, Ontario, but they had never acted together until Dilemma. Later they played in Shaw’s Candidaand, in 1944, after Massey had spent eight months as a Major in the Canadian Army “shuffling papers,” they appeared in their third stage production, Lovers and Friends.

Stage and screen continued to occupy Massey’s life throughout the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s. In 1952, he completed the script for a play he wrote based on the novel, The Hanging Judge. It was a success in London. Later that year, he teamed up with Tyrone Power and Dame Judith Anderson for performances of Stephen Vincent Benet’s John Brown’s Body that they continued to perform from time to time on tour over the next two years.

A return to Shakespearian roles in The Tempest and Julius Caesar occupied him for the summer of 1956 at Stratford, Connecticut, where he was greatly impressed by the acting skills of a fellow Canadian, Christopher Plummer. He then appeared in the movie, East of Eden and, in 1957, returned to Broadway to play Mr. Zuss, the old actor who represents God in the Archibald MacLeish play JB. “It was a rich experience to play Mr. Zuss to the brilliant, diabolic Nickles of Christopher Plummer,” Massey wrote.

In 1959 when Massey played the father in the Hitchcock drama, Roadhog, he was impressed by Richard Chamberlain, the actor playing his son. Shortly afterwards, Massey agreed to play the gruff but kindly old Dr. Gillespie in the TV series, Dr. Kildare, with Chamberlain as lead; this show continued in prime time until 1966. In 1968, he appeared in his last movie, Mackenna’s Gold, and two years later, Canada’s premier stage and screen actor made his last appearance on the London stage in Robert Anderson’s I Never Sang for My Father. He thought this would be his last stage appearance as he was then suffering the crippling effects of arthritis, but, in 1975, he was asked to play the role of 93-year-old Nonno in Tennessee Williams’ Night of the Iguana that starred Richard Chamberlain, Dorothy McGuire, and Eleanor Parker.

Massey “accepted the offer with the old excitement of another show,” but was horrified when he forgot the four middle verses of the six-verse poem he was to recite at the closing curtain scene during an early out-of-town performance. Tennessee Williams was in the audience and, after also taking a bow on stage, he put his arms around Massey and murmured, “That’s not a bad ending. Thank you for a beautiful performance.”

Massey, however, mortified by his failure, told himself, “You’ve had it. You are not singled out to be immune to the indignities of advanced years” and bowed out of the role of Nonno when the play reached New York. He turned to writing and, in the next three years, produced a two-volume autobiography, When I Was Young and A Hundred Different Lives before he died in 1983.

Mel James