Naunton Wayne & Basil Radford

From England’s film industry comes the team of Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford. They first appear together in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938), where they portray their trademark personae as the slightly bumbling and obliviously obsessive cricket aficianados. These characters were created by another team (albeit a writing team) of Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder and garnered Mr. Wayne and Mr. Radford performances in three other feature-length movies: Night Train to Munich (1940), Crook’s Tour (1941), Millions Like Us (1943). While their talents as a team were put to great use on radio and in movie shorts, they did continue to appear in eight more feature-length films throughout the 1940s, making their final movie collaboration in 1949. It was on radio in 1952, however, that the team came to an untimely end. While in the middle of his “Rogues’ Gallery” on-air performance opposite Mr. Wayne, Mr. Radford (the mustachioed and slightly older of the two) collapsed from a heart attack and died.

The Lady Vanishes (1938)
Night Train to Munich (1940)
Crook’s Tour (1941)
The Next of Kin (1942)
Millions Like Us (1943)
Dead of Night (1945)
A Girl in a Million (1946)
Quartet (1948)
Passport to Pimlico (1949)
Helter Skelter (1949)
It’s Not Cricket (1949)
Stop Press Girl (1949)