Valentine Dyall

Valentine Dyall (7 May 1908 – 24 June 1985) was an English character actor. He worked regularly as a voice actor, and was known for many years as "The Man in Black", the narrator of the BBC Radio horror series Appointment with Fear. He was the son of the actor Franklin Dyall and the actress and author Mary Phyllis Joan Logan, who acted and wrote as Concordia Merrel. 1930s to 1950s In 1934, Dyall appeared with his father, actor Franklin Dyall, at the Manchester Hippodrome in Sir Oswald Stoll's presentation of Shakespeare's Henry V, playing the roles of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Captain Gower, and a cardinal of France. He also appeared in one movie with his father, the 1943 spy thriller Yellow Canary; Dyall's part was that of a German U-boat commander attempting to kidnap a British agent from a ship in the Atlantic, while his father played the ship's captain. In the same year he had a small role as a German officer in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and, the following year, played the Duke of Burgundy in Laurence Olivier's film version of Henry V.