Lionel Alfred William Atwill was an English and American stage and screen actor. He began his acting career at the Garrick Theatre. After coming to the United States, he appeared in Broadway plays and Hollywood films. Some of his more significant roles were in Captain Blood (1935), Son of Frankenstein (1939) and To Be or Not to Be (1942).
Atwill in 1921 as Deburau
Lionel Atwill, Alla Nazimova, Amy Veness and Harry Mestayer in the 1918 English-language production of Ibsen's The Wild Duck—one of six leading roles Atwill played on Broadway that season
Lionel Atwill and Katharine Cornell in the Broadway production of The Outsider (1924)
Signed drawing of Lionel Atwill by Manuel Rosenberg 1924
Captain Blood (1935 film)
Captain Blood is a 1935 American black-and-white swashbuckling pirate film from First National Pictures and Warner Bros. Pictures, produced by Harry Joe Brown and Gordon Hollingshead, directed by Michael Curtiz and starring Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Basil Rathbone, and Ross Alexander. With a screenplay by Casey Robinson, the film is based on the 1922 novel Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini and concerns an imprisoned doctor and his fellow prisoners who escape their cruel island captivity to become West Indies pirates. An earlier 1924 Vitagraph silent film version of Captain Blood starred J. Warren Kerrigan as Peter Blood. Warner Bros. risked pairing two relatively unknown performers in the lead roles. Flynn's performance made him a major Hollywood star and established him as the natural successor to Douglas Fairbanks and a "symbol of an unvanquished man" during the Great Depression. Captain Blood also established de Havilland, in just her fourth screen appearance, as a major star and was the first of eight films costarring Flynn and de Havilland. In 1938 they would be reunited with Rathbone in The Adventures of Robin Hood. The same year, Rathbone also starred with Flynn in The Dawn Patrol. In 1962, Flynn's son Sean starred in The Son of Captain Blood.
Theatrical release poster
De Havilland and Flynn in Captain Blood