Robert Adair (1900-54) was an American who was educated in the United Kingdom and spent much of his life there.
He made his screen debut, presumably following stage experience, playing Captain Hardy in James Whale’s adaptation of Journey’s End (1930). His name was, for some reason, spelt A’Dair. He would work for Whale again in The Invisible Man (1933) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935).
Adair made uncredited appearances in around fifty other American pictures, including The Farmer Takes a Wife (1935), Top Hat (1935), Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), Sylvia Scarlett (1935) and Bulldog Drummond Escapes (1937). He then returned to the UK, where he worked in both films and, later on, television. Adair was in Hitchcock’s Jamaica Inn (1939) and Stage Fright (1950), and also Hawks’s I Was a Male War Bride (1949), which was partly filmed in England.
Adair’s final film, made shortly before his death, was Meet Mr Callaghan (1954), in which he had a rare leading role.
In 1934, Adair played the trainer of the English rowing team in MGM’s Student Tour.
