Having tried all kinds of ways in the late 1920s to find work in to the British cinema, Esmond’s modest break eventually came when he was asked to appear as a radio operator in a 1929 film called The Blue Peter. He prepared for the part by studying morse code and reading up on radio techniques, but when he turned up at the ship in Tilbury docks where filming was talking place, he found that as breaks go it was a very modest one indeed and all his preparation had been unnecessary.  He was merely required to walk out of one cabin into another and hand a radio message to another actor, Matheson Lang. For Esmond it was a milestone but a bit of an anticlimax for his family and servants who went along en masse to their local cinema in Putney to see "Mr Esmond" in his first picture.

Later the same year Esmond found himself at Nettlefold Studios in Walton-On-Thames, working alongside his boating friend, Vernon Sewell, on another film - 77 Park Lane (1931) - scripted by an ambitious young man called Michael Powell. This was the second film Powell had worked on at Nettlefold and followed close on the heels of a production called Caste which starred Nora Swinburne, though not close enough that she and Esmond met - another six years would pass before their paths crossed.

t The cover of a booklet supplied to cinema owners by United Artists to help them promote their latest film release, 77 Park Lane (1931), in which Esmond played Philip Connor, a young man who falls foul of rogues in an illegal gambling den.

Michael Powell clearly felt that he could have done a better job as the director of 77 Park Lane and involved himself as much as possible in every aspect of production. In the process he was getting to know artists and technicians with whom he would work time and again, developing a pool of talent on which he could, and would, call upon for future production, most notably his collaborations with Emeric Pressburger as 'The Archers'. One of these was Vernon Sewell. Another was Esmond Knight. 

In the first part of his autobiography, A Life In Movies, Powell, referring to  77 Park Lane, wrote:  "The young man who played her (Betty Stockfield's) brother in the film was a real find. He was a sulky, handsome young man with a mane of black hair and magnetic eyes. He was almost too romantically handsome to be true. Then one day I saw him giggling with one of the sound engineers and I realised that it was all a pose and he had a sense of humour. He was not tall but I felt he had star potential. His name was Esmond Knight." 

p Michael Powell, who first met Esmond

on the set of the film 77 Park Lane,

for which Powell wrote the screenplay.

Esmond's initial impression of the man

who would become one Britain's most

highly regarded film directors was that

he bore a strong resemblance to the

Martin Droeshout portrait of

By July Esmond was once more out of work. But his luck was about to change. Quite by chance he bumped in to an actor friend in the street who told him about auditions that were taking place that same day for a new musical play about the Strauss family called Waltzes From Vienna. Esmond hurried along to the theatre where the auditions were being held, managed to bluff his way on stage, and the next day “was engaged to play a small part and understudy Denis Noble at the enormous salary of £15 a week.” 

t A publicity shot of Esmond taken in the early 1930s around the time of Waltzes From Vienna.

Then a second piece of luck came his way. Six days before they opened, the actor booked to play the leading part of Johann Strauss Junior withdrew and, to his delight, Esmond was offered the role. It was the opportunity to join a large mainstream West End production he had been hoping for for a long time and he could hardly believe his good fortune. This was of course a musical and the part of Johan Strauss Junior required him to sing, as well as conduct a large orchestra on stage. He worked hard to make sure that his musicianship was up to standard and he did not let the producers down. Unbeknown to them, he had been secretly learning the role in the hope that a chance such as this might occur.

Waltzes From Vienna was a great success and ran for a year. At first he only played the matinees, sharing the role with Robert Halliday, but when it became his entirely the management increased his salary to the dizzy heights of £40 a week “…. and at last I was able to have some of the things which for years I had craved.” He bought some badly needed new clothes and also able to save a good deal of money for the first time in his life. Nevertheless a year is a long time to continue playing the same part and by the end of the run Esmond was ready to move on to pastures new. After a somewhat disastrous special performance in Love for Love with Fran at the Faculty of Arts (in which he found himself singing a different version of a song from his accompanist on the harpsichord!) he found himself involved in another musical play, this time Wild Violets at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. After a poor first night and a lukewarm beginning, followed by pay cuts for all the cast, the production gradually picked up and ran for nine months. Esmond was very fond of the show and regarded the musical score by Robert Stolz as one of the finest ever written for a show.

As Eddie Martin in The Bermondsey Kid (1933) u

Picture courtesy of The British Film Institute

Meanwhile Esmond's Uncle Chas had been approached by Alexander Korda's company, London Film Productions, to provide some hawks for a falconry sequence in their new film, The Private Life of Henry VIII, starring Charles Laughton (as Henry), Merle Oberon, Elsa Manchester and Robert Donat. After initially refusing because he felt it would be impossible to produce the authentic number of hawks with which Henry VIII would have gone hunting, Chas Knight then enlisted his nephew to help train a number of different types of birds (falcons, tiercels and merlins) for the scene, and after much hard work they did so very successfully. They aimed for authenticity as much as possible with the hawks wearing period hoods, jesses, bells and leashes and perched on an authentic frame (a "cadge") on which they would have been carried in Tudor times.

Esmond in traditional falconer's dress, from a painting by Alexander Christie p

        (Click on picture to enlarge)

Both Charles and Esmond acted as falconers during the filming, which Alexander Korda directed himself. In the final edited film the falconry sequence was not very prominent, providing merely an element of Tudor colour, and the work of the Knights went uncredited. Nevertheless it gave Esmond an opportunity to indulge in one of his great passions at a professional level, and it was gratifying for him that the film was an enormous success, especially in the USA.

A signed "camera study" of Esmond with falcon