Cat. #00041315: LIONEL ATWILL

RARE vintage 8x10-inch sepia-tone matte-finish portrait, boldly signed and inscribed in black fountain pen in the early 1930s. In good condition for its age, with a surface crack to the upper right-hand area and a light crinkle near his ear, neither affecting the writing itself. After performing Ibsen and Shaw on the London stage, distinguished British actor Lionel Atwill relocated to the United States, where he found new work playing aristocratic villains and mad doctors in silent and early talkie films. A Universal Pictures fixture and veritable a titan of the horror and science-fiction genres, he stole every scene as Dr. Xavier in Doctor X (1932), Dr. Von Niemann in The Vampire Bat (1933), Ivan Igor in Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), Eric Gordon in Murders in the Zoo (1933), Jerome Breen in The Sphinx (1933), Inspector Neumann in Tod Browning’s Mark of the Vampire (1935), one-armed Inspector Krogh in Son of Frankenstein (1939), Walter Stevens in The Gorilla (1939), Dr. Rigas in Ma