Edmund Gwenn

Edmund Gwenn was a Welsh-born actor of the English stage who had been performing since the turn of the twentieth century, a favorite of George Bernard Shaw, long before Hollywood gave him the role that would make his round, kindly face immortal. For decades he was a versatile and respected player of fathers, shopkeepers and gentle eccentrics; then, at seventy, he became Santa Claus.

In "Miracle on 34th Street" (1947) Gwenn played Kris Kringle, a department-store Santa who may or may not be the genuine article, and he did something almost impossible: he made pure goodness compelling. There is not a trace of saccharine or wink in the performance; he simply is Father Christmas, warm and mischievous and entirely convincing, and the film's magic depends wholly on believing him. It won him the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, and his gracious acceptance line, to the effect that now everyone knew there really was a Santa Claus, has become part of Hollywood lore.

Gwenn was far from a one-role actor. He worked memorably for Alfred Hitchcock across three decades, from British thrillers of the 1930s to the black comedy "The Trouble with Harry" (1955), in which he plays an old sea captain convinced he has accidentally killed the corpse at the story's center, a droll, delicately funny turn. He was the wise Mr. Bennet in "Pride and Prejudice" (1940) and the kindly rat-catcher's father in "Lassie Come Home" (1943), and he even faced down giant ants in the creature feature "Them!" (1954), lending science-fiction hokum the ballast of his gravity.

He worked steadily until ill health forced him to stop in the mid-1950s, and he died in 1959. A career of more than half a century contained scores of fine performances, but he understood that he had been granted one perfect part. To generations of children and their parents he is not an actor at all but the living proof that Santa Claus exists, and there may be no purer testament to a character actor's craft than that.