1877–1959 · English stage and screen actor; Academy Award winner
Born Edmund John Kellaway in Wandsworth, London, Gwenn spent years at the Court Theatre under J. E. Vedrenne and Harley Granville-Barker, where he played Straker, the chauffeur in Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman, before Hollywood remade him as a character star. He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor as Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street (1947), took a second nomination for Mister 880 (1950), and turned up in four Alfred Hitchcock films. He died of pneumonia in Woodland Hills, California, on 6 September 1959, twenty days short of his eighty-second birthday — which is where this story begins.