Raymond Hart Massey (August 30, 1896 – July 29, 1983) was a Canadian/American actor, known for his commanding, stage-trained voice.

Biography

Massey was married three times.


Margery Fremantle from 1921 to 1929 (divorce); they had one child, architect Geoffrey Massey.
Adrianne Allen from 1929 to 1939 (divorce); Allen was a London and Broadway stage actress. They had two children who followed him into acting: Anna Massey and Daniel Massey.
Dorothy Whitney from 1939 until her death in 1982.
His high-profile estrangement and then divorce from Adrianne Allen was the inspiration for Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin's script for the film Adam's Rib (1949), starring Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, and indeed Massey married the lawyer who represented him in court, Dorothy Whitney, while his then ex-wife, Allen, married the opposing lawyer, William Dwight Whitney.

Raymond Massey's older brother was Vincent Massey, the first Canadian-born Governor General of Canada. Raymond Massey also dabbled in politics, appearing in a television advertisement in 1964 in support of the conservative Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater of Arizona. Massey denounced U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson for a "no-win" strategy in the Vietnam War, suggesting that Goldwater would pursue an aggressive strategy and win the war quickly. (Johnson, who defeated Goldwater, later did expand the war without success.)

Massey died of pneumonia in Los Angeles, California on July 29, 1983, a month before he would have turned 87. That was the same day as the death of David Niven, who had co-starred with him in The Prisoner of Zenda and A Matter of Life and Death. Massey is buried in New Haven, Connecticut's Beaverdale Memorial Park.

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