Edmund Purdom

Edmund Purdom — Biography

English actor Edmund Purdom was nicknamed "the Replacement Star" in 1950s Hollywood, though his longer career unfolded in European genre cinema. He is best remembered for the leads in two 1954 films, The Student Prince and The Egyptian; he lived in Rome and died there on 1 January 2009.

He began acting in 1946 with the Northampton Repertory Company. After military service he played two seasons at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, where Laurence Olivier noticed him and invited him to tour America; in 1951-52 he took small parts on Broadway with the Olivier and Vivien Leigh company. Small roles in Julius Caesar and Titanic (1953) won him a long-term MGM contract. He was cast in The Student Prince after Mario Lanza was dropped, with Lanza's voice dubbed for the songs, and was handed the lead in The Egyptian when Marlon Brando withdrew. His next MGM films, Athena, The Prodigal and The King's Thief, did poorly at the box office, and he left the studio.

In 1958 he starred in the British series Sword of Freedom and then moved to Italy, where he settled for good. After Herod the Great, The Cossacks and Nefertiti, Queen of the Nile, he worked from the 1970s to the 1990s with directors such as Juan Piquer Simón, Joe D'Amato, Sergio Martino and Ruggero Deodato, in films including 2019, After the Fall of New York, Ator l'invincibile and Absurd.