Villain of the Month: John Ward
Back in the late thirties if you were looking for someone to play a fussy Englishman, you’d look no further than John Ward. From his film appearance in the Republic serial, Robinson Crusoe of Clipper Island (1936) playing a jovial but dim witted novelist who helps star Ray Mala break up a spy ring on a jungle island, Ward became typecast for the rest of the decade.
He would go on to play a fussy gentleman’s gentleman in Gene Autry’s Boots and Saddles (1937), a fussy archeologist in the Three Mesquiteers’ Riders of the Whistling Skull (1937). and a fussy yacht captain in the Harold Lloyd comedy Professor Beware (1938).
His other serials include playing a doctor in Republic’s Dick Tracy (1937), a British consul in Republic’s Drums of Fu Manchu (1940), and then there was Columbia’s Holt of the Secret Service (1941). Ward got to do a bit of real acting in his final film, playing a ruthless counterfeiter who hides behind the facade of a fussy dilettante.
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