 promptly dispatched him over here. One of his first ports of call from his base at London's Savoy Hotel was Teddington Studios where he paid a surprise visit to an old friend from Warner Bros, Max Milder, an American movie producer. Milder was working on The Dark Tower, a circus movie starring Herbert Lom. To the delight of the 250 extras who had been called for a scene in the big top, Robinson – who loved circuses – borrowed the clown's oversized shoes, hopped into the ring and put on an impromptu performance which reportedly left cast, crew and real-life circus folk 'limp with laughter'. He told reporters that his next film was going to be a war movie, set on board a destroyer – just like the newly released British drama In Which We Serve which he thought might be 'the greatest picture I have ever seen'. He squeezed in a pilgrimage to Fleet Street, to pay homage to Baron Julius de Reuter, the founder of the news agency Reuters, whom he had portrayed in the movie A Dispatch From Reuters a couple of years previously. At its headquarters, he met Reu){kind=link}
Too old to fight, the star known as Little Caesar landed in the UK to broadcast morale-boosting speeches across Europe – cigar in mouth
Two years after Winston Churchill’s “We shall fight them on the beaches” speech, another short and charismatic figure, seldom photographed without a cigar, lifted listeners’ spirits with a series of rousing speeches up and down Britain – and over its airwaves.
Genial American movie star Edward G Robinson – known the world over as one of Hollywood’s most popular screen gangsters – crossed the Atlantic on a Clipper plane in late October 1942, 50 years ago this month. The Romanian-born Jewish actor, whose real name was Emanuel Goldenberg and who had first shot to fame thanks to his performance as the eponymous hoodlum Little Caesar a decade earlier, was on a mission to broadcast across Europe from London and to entertain the American forces based in Britain.
At the age of 48, he was too old to fight, so he had gone to Washington to ask that the American government make use of him – and the Office of War Information (OWI) promptly dispatched him over here.
One of his first ports of call from his base at London’s Savoy Hotel was Teddington Studios where he paid a surprise visit to an old friend from Warner Bros, Max Milder, an American movie producer. Milder was working on The Dark Tower, a circus movie starring Herbert Lom. To the delight of the 250 extras who had been called for a scene in the big top, Robinson – who loved circuses – borrowed the clown’s oversized shoes, hopped into the ring and put on an impromptu performance which reportedly left cast, crew and real-life circus folk “limp with laughter”.