David Tomlinson

David Cecil MacAlister Tomlinson (7 May 1917 – 24 June 2000) was an English stage, film, and television actor and comedian. Having been described as both a leading man and a character actor, he is primarily remembered for his roles as authority figure George Banks in Mary Poppins, fraudulent magician Professor Emelius Browne in Bedknobs and Broomsticks, and as hapless antagonist Peter Thorndyke in The Love Bug. Tomlinson was posthumously inducted as a Disney Legend in 2002. Early life David Cecil McAlister Tomlinson was born in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, on 7 May 1917, the son of Florence Elizabeth Tomlinson (née Sinclair-Thomson) (1890–1986) and Clarence Samuel Tomlinson (1883–1978), a well-respected London solicitor. He attended Tonbridge School and left to join the Grenadier Guards for 16 months. His father then secured him a job as a clerk at Shell Mex House. His stage career grew from amateur stage productions to his 1940 film debut in Quiet Wedding. His career was interrupted when he entered Second World War service as a Flight Lieutenant in the RAF. During the war, he learned to fly in Canada and was assigned as a flying instructor in the UK, while also appearing in three more films. He continued flying after the war. On one occasion, a Tiger Moth plane he was piloting crashed into woodland near his back garden after he lost consciousness while performing aerobatics. Film career Tomlinson played Philip Rowe, one of the three British airmen escaping from a German POW camp, in the 1950 British Film The Wooden Horse.