Trevor Howard

Trevor Howard's first leading part was in David Lean's Brief Encounter. Adapted from a one-act play by Noel Coward, the film has him as Alec Harvey, a doctor who meets Laura Jesson at a railway station when he takes a piece of coal grit out of her eye. Writing for Criterion, Adrian Turner holds his playing and Celia Johnson's to be perfectly measured and finds their behaviour convincing from beginning to end; he does not count the two of them as film people. Four years afterwards, in Carol Reed's The Third Man, he took on Calloway, the sardonic British police major of a story set in post-war Vienna, whom Michael Wilmington describes as pragmatic and mercilessly unsparing. Holly Martins, the naive American novelist played by Joseph Cotten, measures himself against him throughout the investigation.