Biography
The movie character actor Skelton Knaggs, who was possessed of one of the most unusual visages ever to grace motion pictures, was born Skelton Barnaby Knaggs in the Hillsborough district of Sheffield, England on June 27, 1911. Before he became known for his unusual physical appearance that was put to good use in many horror films and thrillers, he was a man of the theater: he learned his craft after moving to London to study acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Upon graduation, he became a Shakespearean actor, appearing on stage in Shakespeare's Cymbeline, but he is known as a movie actor, first plying that trade in English quota quickies in the 1930s, making his debut in The High Command (1936), in support of Lionel Atwill. At the end of the decade, as the war clouds gathered over Europe, he appeared in Michael Powell's U-Boat 29 (1939) with Conrad Veidt.
After moving to Los Angeles, California, Knaggs found steady work in Hollywood movies. His diminutive frame and eccentric-looking looking appearance led to him being type-cast in sinister parts, usually in horror movies. Knaggs was employed by directors for his ability to inject a menacing mood into a picture through his unique presence alone.
He made his American film debut in the 1939 Poverty Row potboiler Torture Ship (1939) for the Producers Distributing Corporation. Knaggs appeared as a murderer shanghaied by a mad doctor played by Irving Pichel, who indulged his penchant for medical research on a ship stocked with criminals as a floating laboratory, the villains used as guinea pigs for glandular experiments. He next appeared in the Victor McLaglen picture Diamond Frontier (1940) at Universal. He did not appear again in motion pictures until 1943, when he was cast in Thumbs Up (1943) at Republic. From then on, he had a busy movie career for the next 12 years.
Along with his classical acting training, Knaggs' looks and demeanor (to say nothing about that memorable name) enabled him to make the transition to higher-budgeted films produced by the major studios, although he remained typecast in creepy roles. He became a regular supporting player in Universal Pictures B horror picture unit, popping up in such classics of the genre as House of Dracula (1945) (in which he appeared as the rabble rouser "Steinmuhl"). Other memorable roles came in The Invisible Man's Revenge (1944) and Terror by Night (1946), the latter movie being the penultimate entry in the Basil Rathbone & Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes series at Universal. In the Holmes movie, Knaggs has a role as a stealthy assassin.
Typed in malevolent supporting parts from the beginning of his career in Hollywood, it was a genre ghetto that he could not break out of. However, it did provide him with the finest role of his career, and the one part that came closest to a starring role, the mute Finn in producer Val Lewton's The Ghost Ship (1943) (directed by Mark Robson). Knaggs played a Finnish seaman in the psychological thriller (a mute, though his character narrates the film's key sections with an internal voice-over monologue). Despite turning in a fine performance in one of the seminal classics of the horror genre, Knaggs' reputation did not gain much luster as "The Ghost Ship" was withdrawn from distribution soon after its release due to legal problems, not going back into circulation until the mid-1990s.
He played villains in Dick Tracy vs. Cueball (1946) and Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome (1947) (in which the spectacularly unattractive Knaggs mocks Boris Karloff's "gruesome" face).
Knaggs briefly returned to England in the late 1940s, marrying Thelma Crawshaw in 1949. Returning to Hollywood as the decade of the 1950s approached, Knaggs appeared the lab assistant of mad doctor 'Alan Napier' in the 1949 Bowery Boys film "Master Minds" (featuring 'Glenn Strange' as the monster "Atlas"), as a villain in Columbia's science-fiction serial Captain Video: Master of the Stratosphere (1951), and as one of the sidekicks of Robert Newton's Blackbeard, the Pirate (1952). The last film in which he appeared was Fritz Lang's Moonfleet (1955).
In 1955, Knaggs died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 43. His like will likely never be seen again!
