Jack Hawkins
John Edward “Jack” Hawkins (September 14, 1910 – July 18, 1973) was an English film actor of the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s.
Hawkins was born at Lyndhurst Road, Wood Green, Middlesex, the son of master builder Thomas George Hawkins and his wife, Phoebe née Goodman. The youngest of four children in a close-knit family, Jack was educated at Trinity County School, Wood Green, where he joined his school choir at the age of eight; two years later he sang in the local operatic society’s Patience by Gilbert and Sullivan.
Hawkins attended stage school in London, the Italia Conti Academy, which led to his London stage debut in Where the Rainbow Ends at the Holborn Empire on 26 December 1923, a production that also included the young Noël Coward. Hawkins made his New York stage debut on Broadway by 22 March 1929 as Second Lieutenant Hibbert in R. C. Sherriff’s Journey’s End, by the age of 18.
As early as 1933, the drama critic of the Evening News called him ‘the most indubitable of matinée idols’ and predicted that he might outstrip talented contemporaries such as Ralph 
Richardson and John Gielgud, and in the pre-war years Hawkins often worked with the latter. The high point of this collaboration was Gielgud’s staging, in the period of the Phoney War, of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest in which Hawkins scintillated in the role of Algernon Moncrieff.
Hawkins was married twice: from 22 October 1932 until 1942 to the actress Jessica Tandy (1909–1994), with whom he had a daughter, and from 31 October 1947 until his death to actress Doreen Lawrence (whose real name was Doreen Mary Atkinson, née Beadle), with whom he had a daughter, Caroline and two sons, Nick and Andrew.
