Ernest Lotinga

Sunderland’s Ernest, or Ernie, Lotinga took a successful music hall career into the cinema. His hapless Jimmy Josser character found an audience in a series of 1930s comedy films, including Josser in the Army and Josser Joins the Navy.

His stage work attracted a striking admirer in T. S. Eliot. Writing to Virginia Woolf after seeing Lotinga perform, the poet called him “Magnificent” and “the greatest living British histrionic artist”.