15. A Movie Star Who Started His Career in the British Army
British movie star David Niven (1910 – 1983) led a rich life as a memoirist and novelist, and most significantly as a perennially popular character actor. His accolades include an Oscar for Best Actor for his role in the 1958 movie Separate Tables. He also won acclaim for his roles as Phileas Fogg in Around the World in Eighty Days, as The Phantom in the Pink Panther, and as a squadron leader in A Matter of Life and Death. He was born into a comfortable bourgeoisie family, whose antecedents included a lieutenant general in the British Army. Niven lost his father in 1915 when the latter was killed in the Gallipoli Campaign. His mother remarried a knight with whom she had been having an affair before she was widowed, and who was probably David’s biological father.
The young Niven exhibited a wicked sense of humor from early on. Perhaps too much so, as his propensity for pranks often earned him corporal punishment at his preparatory school. He took his licks and kept pranking until administrators expelled him when was ten. That doomed his chances of getting into Eton, the elite private school his parents had hoped to send him to. So they sent him to the era’s dumping ground for the unpromising scions of Britain’s elite: the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, from which he graduated in 1930. After two years in the military, Niven resigned his commission and left for Hollywood to become an actor.
