Scarce vintage 8x10-inch black and white portrait, boldly signed in black fountain pen around 1940s. In good condition. Classically-trained stage actor Reginald Gardiner appeared in one silent picture, Alfred Hitchcock's The Lodger in 1926. During the talkie era, he was hailed as  "new" Hollywood find, handsome enough to play romantic leads, as in the Laurel and Hardy comedy Flying Deuces (1939). Nonetheless, he seemed to prefer character roles, typically cast as goofy manservants or suave, slightly untrustworthy British gentlemen. He was memorable as a traffic cop who imagines himself a symphony conductor in Born to Dance (1936), a schtick he would repeat in A Damsel in Distress (1937); a fascist military man who turns his back on a heartless despot in in Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator (1940); and Beverly Carlton, a send-up of Noel Coward, in The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942).  In the 1960s, he played Bernie Park on several episodes of T.V.'s "Batman" (1966).

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