Ernest Cossart came to Hollywood to play a succession of butlers,
valets and man-servants with names like Binns, Jeepers or Brassett. In
fact, if you saw Engel (1937) or
Letter of Introduction (1938),
you may have assumed that he simply stepped from one movie set to
another. Always at home donning bat-wing collars, cut-away coats and
striped trousers, portly, beetle-browed Ernest Cossart was America's
notion of the perfect English
'gentleman's gentleman' (along with fellow émigrés Arthur Treacher,
Barnett Parker,
Eric Blore and
Alan Mowbray, though perhaps a little less
condescending).
With ancestors deriving from Scandinavia, Germany, Poland, Russia, and England, Ernest Cossart was born Emil Gottfried Adolph von Holst in Cheltenham, England, the son of a prominent musician. His brother Gustav Holst became a famous composer and music teacher. Emil adopted the stage name 'Ernest Cossart' after a brief spell as clerk for a wine merchant. He gave his first theatrical performance in 1896, then acted with provincial repertory companies before moving to the U.S. in 1908. His career on Broadway got off to a flying start with a leading role (as a colonel of Hussars) in the
musical comedy "The Girls of Gottenberg". For the next twenty years
(interrupted only by wartime service with the Canadian Army), his name
remained high up in the list of credits.
Cossart's Hollywood career did not eventuate until 1935, when he was
signed by Paramount. Except for occasional loan-outs, he remained with
this, the most cosmopolitan of the studios, until 1945. Aside from
butling, Cossart could also be relied upon to effectively impersonate
Roman Catholic priests (Father McGee in
Der Jazzsänger (1946)),
chimney sweeps (Tom Clink in
Der Henker von London (1939), uttering
the famous line "Better have a black face than be worried about black
deeds") and waiters
(Champagne Waltz (1937)). Easily
one of his best roles was as the irascible, but kind-hearted Irish
father of Ginger Rogers in
Fräulein Kitty (1940). Cossart retired
from acting in 1949, having made his curtain call in the flop Broadway
play "The Ivy Green". He died two years later in New York at the age of
74.
