Terry-Thomas

The gap between his two upper front teeth measured a third of an inch, and he built a career on it. Terry-Thomas played the English upper class as a species of confidence trickster: the cad, the bounder, the toff with a monocle and a cigarette holder and a voice that sounded like an apology being used as a weapon. Nobody has ever done a better line in cheerful, unembarrassed caddishness.

He is in The Private Life of Henry VIII in 1933, uncredited, as a man in a crowd. The star turns arrive two decades later. Major Hitchcock in I'm All Right Jack (1959) is the compact English version of him. Then Hollywood took him: J. Algernon Hawthorne in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), one Englishman in a film full of American comedians, getting the sharpest laughs by being appalled at all of them, and Charles in How to Murder Your Wife (1965).

The best running joke in his filmography is a family. He is Sir Percy Ware-Armitage in Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965) and Sir Cuthbert Ware-Armitage in Monte Carlo or Bust! (1969), the same brand of aristocratic cheat sabotaging a race in two different decades.

Later he moved into horror, as Dr. Longstreet in The Abominable Dr. Phibes and a segment lead in The Vault of Horror, and he gave Disney one of its great vocal villains as Sir Hiss in the 1973 Robin Hood, where the sneer was already built into the voice. The credits here stop in the late 1970s, with a governor in The Last Remake of Beau Geste.