Aubrey Smith — From England Captain to Hollywood Patriarch

Smith's England Test, in March 1889, was a one-off. The Warton tour was a private venture, the matches retrospectively given Test status. By the time the tour ended Smith was already drifting from cricket toward business and stage acting.

The cricket-to-Hollywood arc was made possible by Smith's height, voice and English-establishment manner — qualities that became enormously valuable to the American film industry once the talkies arrived in 1927-28.

Charles Aubrey Smith was born in Westminster in 1863, educated at Charterhouse and St John's College, Cambridge. He played for Sussex from 1882, was selected as captain of Major Warton's England side to South Africa in 1888-89, and led England in the first Test ever played there. He took 5 for 19 in the first innings, helped England to an 8-wicket win, and was never picked again.

After the tour, Smith stayed in South Africa and went into business with teammate Monty Bowden, working on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. The business failed; he returned to England in the early 1890s and joined a touring stage company in 1895. By 1900 he was a leading West End actor; by the 1920s a leading West End character actor.

In 1930, with the advent of sound film, Smith — now in his late sixties — moved to Hollywood and became one of the studio system's go-to British character actors. He played generals, ambassadors, peers and elder statesmen in The Prisoner of Zenda (1937), The Four Feathers (1939), Rebecca (1940), And Then There Were None (1945) and dozens of other films. Tall (6 ft 4), gaunt, with a clipped accent and a luxuriant moustache, he was the platonic Hollywood Englishman.

In 1932 Smith founded the Hollywood Cricket Club, importing English grass for the pitch. Members included David Niven, Laurence Olivier, Nigel Bruce, Leslie Howard, Boris Karloff and Errol Flynn. The club still exists. Smith was knighted by George VI in 1944 and died in Beverly Hills on 20 December 1948, aged 85.

“He was a danger to the wellbeing of cricket, encouraging as he did the abolition of long-stop, the clergy's traditional fielding spot in village teams.”

“Aubrey Smith built the cricket field with imported English grass.”

The Hollywood Cricket Club, on the bluff above Beverly Hills, became the gathering point for the British film colony for half a century. Niven recounts in his autobiography the pre-war Sunday matches under Smith's captaincy — the same brisk amateur manner Smith had brought to St George's Park forty-five years earlier.