Sir Lancelot

Sir Lancelot appeared as an actor and/or singer in a dozen Hollywood films made between 1941 and 1958. As a musician, he was a pioneering calypso singer in America during the 1940s, his work paving the way for the subsequent success of Harry Belafonte and Lord Burgess. Though he was extremely popular well into the 1950s, and made a fair number of recordings, it is his film appearances that have kept Sir Lancelot's name alive across the generations. Born Lancelot Victor Edward Pinard to a well-to-do family in Trinidad, he was supposed to study medicine in the United States, but he was spotted singing at a party he attended in New York and was invited to play a two-week engagement at the Village Vanguard in Greenwich Village. He ended up performing there for a year, and a series of concerts on the West Coast that followed led him to a screen appearance in the adventure film Two Yanks in Trinidad. His first credited film work was in the Val Lewton-produced chiller I Walked With a Zombie, where Sir Lancelot's songs provided commentary on the action in the plot, which was a sort of Caribbean transposition of Jane Eyre. He subsequently portrayed dramatic roles in Lewton's The Ghost Ship, as a member of the cargo ship's crew (whose run-in with a group of racist German sailors precipitates a life-and-death crisis for the hero) and Curse of the Cat People, playing the kindly servant who tries to look out for young Ann Carter; the Lewton movies remain his best and most interesting screen appearances. Sir Lancelot also showed up in fluffy comedies like Eve Knew Her Apples, starring Ann Miller; the drama To Have and Have Not, with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall; and the film noir classic Brute Force, starring Burt Lancaster. He often simply played characters designated as "Sir Lancelot," especially after the mid-'40s, in comedies like Linda Be Good (for which he wrote several songs) and horror chiller The Unknown Terror, and finished out his big-screen career in class, in Anthony Quinn's The Buccaneer (1958). He was best known in the 1950s, however, for his singing appearances on television, on the Ed Sullivan and Ray Anthony shows and, most especially, The Dinah Shore Show, where he sang spots for the sponsors' products, including Coca-Cola and Borden's milk, and for which he received an enormous amount of fan mail (reportedly more than Shore herself). Sir Lancelot's last screen appearance was in a straight acting role in a 1967 episode ("Howard's New Life") of The Andy Griffith Show. He continued recording into the 1970s and passed away at the age of 98, in 2001.

~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide