Batten, John (1903-1993), was an actor from New Zealand who bridged the transition between silent movies and sound films. He worked with such great American motion-picture producers and directors as William Fox, D. W. Griffith, and Cecil B. DeMille. From 1928 to 1935, Batten appeared in about a dozen movies, five of them in Hollywood.
Batten was born in Rotorua, New Zealand, and educated at King’s College, Auckland. He worked in his father’s dental surgery and acted in local dramatic productions in his spare time. While traveling to the United Kingdom to further his dental studies, Batten stopped off in San Francisco and began acting in stage plays to earn extra money. Fox, Griffith, and DeMille saw Batten in a production in Los Angeles in 1927. Impressed with Batten’s acting talent, Fox hired him to play the juvenile lead in his silent movie Robinson Crusoe.
During 1927 and 1928, Batten made Back Stage and The Chorus Kid (or Her Great Ambition) for Fox; The Battle of the Sexes for Griffith; and The Godless Girl for DeMille. In 1929, Batten finally reached the United Kingdom and acted in one of the first British talkies, a screen adaptation of the English novelist Thomas Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree. The following year, Batten went to Berlin, Germany, and starred in Liebeswalzer (Love Waltz). The studio made several versions of the movie, each in a different language. Returning to the United Kingdom, he made a movie about soccer called The Great Game (1930). In 1932, Batten starred in a realistic submarine drama called Men Like These. Batten brought one of his best performances to the screen in that film, in which he played a young man overcoming his fear of death. His next movies included The Wonderful Story (1932) and Church Mouse (1935). He then retired from movies and acted in stage and early television productions before returning to New Zealand to work in commercial radio.
During World War II (1939-1945), Batten served in the Royal New Zealand Navy. He interrupted his war service in 1944 to star in the British movie For Those in Peril, about the Royal Air Force’s air-sea rescue service. After the war, Batten continued to work in radio in both New Zealand and Australia. In 1969, he moved back to the United Kingdom and retired to Colchester, Essex.
