Ivor Novello
2 credits on HibingeTV
Welsh actor, composer, and playwright who was one of Britain's biggest stage and screen idols of the 1920s. He starred for Alfred Hitchcock in The Lodger (1927) and Downhill (1927). Later in life he became one of the most successful composers of British musical theatre.
Acted In
Drama, Silent
Downhill is one of the darkest of Hitchcock's early films, a bleak downward spiral he later dismissed but that still carries his signature. Ivor Novello plays a schoolboy who takes the blame for a theft committed by his best friend and is expelled, disowned by his father, and sent sliding through a succession of humiliations in Paris and London. Each act is a step down, and Hitchcock makes the descent literal with a famous shot of an escalator. The film reunites Hitchcock with Novello after The Lodger and is one of the silent pictures restored by the BFI. It entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2023.
Drama · Silent
Downhill
1927 - as Roddy Berwick
Thriller, Crime
Alfred Hitchcock considered The Lodger his first true film, the moment he found the themes that would define his career. A mysterious young man takes a room at a London boardinghouse just as a killer called the Avenger begins murdering blonde women in the fog. The landlady grows suspicious, and her daughter falls for the stranger. Ivor Novello stars as the lodger. The film is drenched in the imagery Hitchcock would return to again and again: the wrong man, the blonde in peril, the guilt that cannot be escaped. The Lodger is the earliest Hitchcock film to survive intact. It entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2023.
Thriller · Crime · Drama · Silent
The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog
1927 - as The Lodger