Wylie Watson was a diminutive Scottish character player with a trademark neatly-trimmed moustache, upturned at the ends. He began his career as a juvenile soprano vocalist in the late 1890s with a family variety act. At one point, he performed 15 times daily at a waxworks.
Watson didn't start his film career until 1929, when he was "discovered" in Hollywood during an American vacation. Although his stay in the U.S. was cut short, he returned to England and became one of the "versatiles," adept at playing an assortment of archetypal Britishers, often shifty or cunning, sometimes officious, weak or hen-pecked.
One of his most notable roles was that of "Mr. Memory" in Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (1935),in which he played a character who claimed to store fifty new facts in his brain every day. Although his part was small, he acted it with pathos and integral to the unfolding of the plot.
Watson also gave good value for money as a small-time crook in Richard Attenborough's Brighton Rock (1948),and as the devious, ever manipulative storekeeper, Joseph Macroon, in Ealing's Whisky Galore! (1949). He had already shown his aptitude for comedy in the wartime educational short, Mr. Proudfoot Shows a Light (1941),where his billiard-playing antics were rudely - and to comic effect - interrupted by a German bomb.
Wylie Watson retired from acting in 1952, except for a small part in Fred Zinnemann's The Sundowners (1960),and emigrated to Australia, where he died in May 1966.
