Raymond (Hart) Massey - Footnote
Actor, born in Toronto, Ontario, SE Canada, the brother of Vincent Massey. He made his stage debut in 1922, and played Lincoln in Abe Lincoln (19389). On film he played leading parts in more than 60 films, including Arsenic and Old Lace (1942) and East of Eden (1955). He is remembered for his long-running television role as Dr Gillespie in the Dr Kildare series during the 1960s.
Raymond Hart Massey (August 30, 1896 – July 29, 1983) was a Canadian actor.
At the outbreak of World War I he joined the Canadian Army, serving with the artillery in the Western Front.
Early in Massey's career, the late President Abraham Lincoln's son, Robert Todd Lincoln (1843-1926), heard Massey perform and was struck by the close similarity of Massey's speaking voice to that of his father.
Despite being Canadian, Massey became famous for his quintessential American roles, as Abraham Lincoln in 1940's Abe Lincoln in Illinois (for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor), in 1940's Santa Fe Trail, in which he played abolitionist John Brown, and as Lincoln again in 1962's How the West Was Won.
He rejoined the Canadian Army during World War II, though he would eventually be released from service and return to acting work.
By his wife, noted London and Broadway stage actress Adrianne Allen (born February 7, 1907, died September 14, 1993), he had two children who followed him into acting: Anna Massey CBE, and the late Daniel Massey. His brother was the late Vincent Massey, the first Canadian-born Governor General of Canada.
He died of pneumonia on July 29, 1983 (the same day as his The Prisoner of Zenda and A Matter of Life and Death co-star David Niven) in Los Angeles, California, at the age of 86, and is buried in New Haven, Connecticut.
Massey has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one for movies at 1719 Vine Street and one for television at 6708 Hollywood Blvd.
See also: Other Canadian pioneers in early Hollywood
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