The Scoundrel (1935) | Langley

Noël Coward’s first talking role on screen, he plays a waspish publisher who carelessly destroys the lives of everyone he meets.

It was made the year after a 34 year old Coward became President of the Actor’s Orphanage. From 1914-38, the Orphanage was at Langley Hall, a country house built in 1628, which later on was RAF Bomber Command HQ and is now a Free School.

Coward is reputed to have made sweeping changes to the school upon becoming its President, including ending cold baths. He brought round celebrity friends like Mary Pickford and Ivor Novello to visit. Coward would hand out Mars Bars and play the piano to the children. He also presided over the removal of a sadistic Headmaster, Mr Austin, who’d beaten boys and tied one lad’s wrists to his ankles at night because he suspected him of masturbating.

Some of the dialogue from the Orphanage’s committee meetings read like lines from ‘The Scoundrel’ and Coward’s plays of this period. In 1936, Coward attended a meeting where he was informed that he’d not been officially made President in 1934.

COWARD
It doesn’t point to brilliant administration.

MRS CHARLOT
(of the pre-Coward administration)
Gerald was its Czar, and Austin its dictator.
(beat)
You are President, in my heart.

COWARD
Your heart has nothing to do with it.

Noël Coward remained President of the Actor’s Orphanage till 1956, a 22-year run, and was replaced by Sir Laurence Olivier. The Orphanage is now run as a charity based in Bloomsbury, ACT.

Film director Peter Collinson, who directed ‘The Italian Job‘ (at Moorgate on the map) and ‘Up The Junction‘ (at Battersea Power Station) attended the orphanage from the age of eight to fourteen. Expelled and considered a “bit of a handful”, Coward is reputed to have walked the young Collinson round the gardens and offered him ten shillings to “be a good boy,” subsequently becoming his godfather and helping him to get his early jobs in the theatre and film. Collinson repaid the debt eventually, casting the elderly Coward in ‘The Italian Job’, this time as the criminal godfather bankrolling the heist.