Laurence Irving

Laurence Irving, the movie set designer and art director, was the grandson of Sir Henry Irving, the greatest actor of the middle- and late-Victorian period and the first actor to be knighted. He was born on April 11, 1897 in London to the actor H.B. Irving and his wife, the actress Dorothea Bird, and named after his uncle, novelist and dramatist Laurence Sydney Brodribb Irving. He studied painting under Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon and became a landscape and marine painter. He then started designing sets in the theatre and later for motion pictures. In addition, he illustrated books. He moved to Hollywood in 1928 to serve as the art director on the Douglas Fairbanks movie The Iron Mask (1929) and collaborated with William Cameron Menzies on the production design of Fairbanks and Mary Pickford's 1929 production of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew (1929). He returned to the UK in the late 1930s and worked on such prestigious productions as Leslie Howard's adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion (1938). When World War II broke out, he became an officer in the Royal Air Force, serving with distinction and becoming a squadron leader (equivalent to a major in the U.S. Air Force). After the war, he continued to work in the movies. In addition to writing two autobiographies, he wrote the definitive biography of his grandfather, "Henry Irving: The Actor and his World". Laurence Irving died on October 23, 1988 in Wittersham, Kent. He was 91 years old.