It seems like for most of the 20th century there was a pipeline, sending British actors who cut their teeth doing Shakespeare on the stage, to make fame and fortune in Hollywood. After a few decades they inevitably were knighted by the Queen. And there would always be someone saying “You think they were good in (movie)…their turn as Richard III in 1952 at the Old Vic was the stuff of legend.”
I haven’t confirmed everyone’s CV, but I think these guys fit the description:
Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, Cedric Hardwicke, Derek Jacobi, Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart. (Kenneth Branagh? Anthony Hopkins?)
Then there are the “bad boys” (ie, alcoholics) who had the same background but “squandered their talents”: Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O’Toole, Oliver Reed.
Are there any women in this category? (Maggie Smith?)
The pipeline existed for almost as long as there’s been a Hollywood. Back in the 30s, the leader of the “British Colony” was C. Aubrey Smith, as famous as a cricketer as actor, at which he kept his fellow Brits playing with all the influence he could bring to bear.
Latecomer David Niven relates in one of his autobiographies how the British WWI vets of the movie industry would gather on November 11 to commemorate their many fallen comrades. Most had served in the London Scots Regiment. (one of its attractions for the artistic types was the wearing of kilts - drab hunter gray, not tartan. When it was Niven’s turn to serve in uniform he too requested posting to a kilted regiment, but was sent to one that wore trews instead).
Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One gave a satirical look at both the British Hollywood colony and the American funeral industry. The latter subject was later the subject of The American Way of Death by Jessica Mitford (the Communist Mitford sister, as opposed to the Nazi ones).
Andrew Garfield, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Emily Blunt, Tom Holland, and Jeremy Irons, for instance. (Garfield is British although he was born in the U.S., because his family was temporarily there when he was born.) So there continues to be a pipeline. It will probably be impossible to make a complete list because there have probably been many such actors who are minor enough that you have never heard of them. If a British (or Irish or Australian or New Zealand or South African or, of course, Canadian) actor can do a decent American accent gets an offer from an American producer to take a role in an American film, they will usually take it.) These days actors are expected to learn how to do a variety of English-language accents in acting school or from an acting coach if they speak English in any accent.
Deborah Kerr and Glynnis Johns both could be on that list, although both switched from stage to film at such a young age that they hadn’t yet built up their credentials.
There are also the older vaudeville comics like Charlie Chaplin and Stan and Ollie. They came from a very different social economic group than the Shakespearean actors mentioned in the OP
Late in his life Olivier reportedly said, “People ask me why I’m playing in this picture. The answer is simple: Money, dear boy. I’m like a vintage wine. You have to drink me quickly before I turn sour. I’m almost used up now, and I can feel the end coming. That’s why I’m taking money now. I’ve got nothing to leave my family but the money I can make from films. Nothing is beneath me if it pays well. I’ve earned the right to damn well grab whatever I can in the time I’ve got left.”
Cabaret went down quite well in New York, but it was with the London production that things got really interesting. Lila Kedrova – a wonderful actress but wrong, I felt, for the part of Fraülein Schneider – got rave reviews. And Judi Dench, who was without question the best Sally Bowles I’ve ever seen in my life, got bad ones. She filled out the character in a way we have never seen, before or since. She was innocent and knowing, vulnerable and tough.
