George Claydon
Casting in 1960s Britain offered actors with dwarfism a narrow menu: pantomime, circus, horror, and the occasional pop oddity. George Claydon worked the whole menu and built a career out of it. He was Photographer George in The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour, broadcast on BBC1 on Boxing Day 1967, and he was World Cup Willie, the official mascot of the England football team in 1966, which is a strange double to carry on one CV.
The screen credits gathered here sit in the same narrow band of British genre film, and he is rarely given a name in them. He is Bruno Fontana in Berserk!, the Joan Crawford horror picture, which is the closest thing to a proper part on this page. Four years later he appears twice in a single year, painted up as one of the Oompa Loompas in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory and uncredited again in the vampire film Twins of Evil. He also played Hercules in the 1975 horror film I Don't Want to Be Born.
Narnia bookends him. He was Ginaarbrik in the 1967 ITV adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and two decades later he came back as Nikabrik in the BBC's The Chronicles of Narnia, a bigger and considerably meaner part than the first one. He also appeared in the 1984 miniseries The Last Days of Pompeii. He died in 2001.
Movies (3)
TV (1)
Where to start with George Claydon
Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory is how almost everyone meets him, and it is the wrong place to judge him: the Oompa Loompas are a chorus in makeup, and no individual performer gets to act inside it. Go to Berserk! instead. Bruno Fontana is a real role in a lurid Joan Crawford vehicle, and Claydon gets to play a person rather than a shape.
After that, The Chronicles of Narnia is the one worth the time. Nikabrik is sour, calculating and carrying a grudge, and the BBC production, cheap as it looks now, hands him scenes to carry on his own. Twins of Evil is for completists, an uncredited bit in a vampire picture that has other things on its mind.