There has only ever been one actor to have won an Oscar at an Academy Awards ceremony where they were also the host – and that was David Niven in 1958. At that time he won the Best Actor award for playing Major Pollock in Separate Tables. His 23-minute on-screen performance in the film has gone down as the briefest appearance to have ever won the Best Actor award. These are not the only interesting facts about this very British Hollywood actor, as a little research into him in some of the online records easily accessed on TheGenealogist will show.

David Niven was born in 1910 and given the names of James David Graham Niven. His birth was registered in the St George Hanover Square district of London in the second quarter. This London birth, however, is contrary to claims that Niven himself would go on to make that he had been born in Kirriemuir, Angus, Scotland. In the 1911 census the one-year-old is definitely recorded by his father as having been born in Pimlico, which at the time would have been in the St George Hanover Square district for births, marriages and deaths. These records, then, seem to disprove Niven’s assertion that he had been born in Scotland!

The actor’s father, William Edward Graham Niven, is noted in the 1911 census as living by ‘private means’ at the time that his son was just one year old. By searching back through the census years, using TheGenealogist’s records, we can easily discover that in 1891 David Niven’s grandfather, also called William Niven, was practising architecture in Epsom. He had been recorded as a 34-year-old widower in this census. While he was the head, other members of his household included his parents, David Graham Niven and Mary Niven, his mother. David Graham Niven, the great-grandfather of the actor, at 70 years of age was a retired member of the Royal College of Surgeons. This David Niven had indeed been born in Scotland, but in Perthshire and not Angus. Also in the household in 1891 were William’s two unmarried sisters who, like their mother, Mary, had been born in Worcestershire.

David Niven’s father, William, attended Wellington College and from the Educational Records on TheGenealogist we can see that he married David’s mother in 1899.

When Europe was plunged into the terrible conflict of the First World War, Niven’s father served as a lieutenant in the Berkshire Yeomanry. This – and the fact that he would never return from the war – we can discover from the note in this school register that he was killed in action 1in 915. A search of the Military Records on TheGenealogist tells us more when we find that he was first recorded as missing in action according to the Casualty Lists compiled from a daily list originally published on 11 September 1915.

We can then go on to find his death recorded in the Index to the Overseas WW1 Deaths for 1915. It had been during the Gallipoli campaign on 21 August 1915 that Lt William E.G. Niven lost his life and he was buried in the Green Hill Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery in that part of Turkey. His name is mentioned in the Oxford University Roll of Service that can also be found from a search of TheGenealogist.

After a respectful period of nearly two years David’s mother, Henrietta, married for a second time in 1917. Her new husband was Thomas Comyn-Platt, who would be knighted in 1922, had been an MP and prior to that worked in the Foreign Office.

To find out a bit more about David Niven’s stepfather we can turn to the reference books in the Peerage, Gentry and Royalty records on TheGenealogist. Here an entry for Sir Thomas in 1942 records his stint as an honorary attaché at Constantinople in 1894 and in Athens 1897-9. It also furnishes us with the constituencies that he contested as a Conservative politician and we discover that he was the son of a Church of England clergyman who had been the vicar of the Holy Trinity at Portsea in Hampshire.

The paternity rumour
What none of the records shed light on is the rumour that Thomas Comyn-Platt and David Niven’s mother had actually been carrying out an affair for several years before the death of her husband occurred in Gallipoli. In Niv: The Authorised Biography of David Niven, the biographer, Graham Lord, went as far as claiming that Sir Thomas was, in fact, the biological father of David Niven and it has been reported that this supposition had support from inside the family as well. If this was the case then David Niven’s stepfather was his real father and that the surname the famous actor bore, as he achieved his fame, was simply that of his mother’s husband at the time that Niven’s birth was registered in London!

Turning our attention towards David Niven’s mother, Henrietta, we find that she had been born in Wales in January 1878. Her baptism can be quickly located from a search in the Anglican Welsh Parish records that are available on TheGenealogist for the whole of Wales. This record shows that, Henrietta having been born on 11 January, the baptism took place on 15 February at Brecon’s St Mary’s church.

The image of the page of the actual parish register shows that her surname caused the vicar, or parish clerk, at the Brecon church a little difficulty in writing it clearly. We are able to see that his first attempt has an ink blot and then a line through it. The occupation of Hensrietta’s father is correctly recorded as an army captain. The ‘1/24 Rgt’ on the page is an abbreviation for the 1st Battalion of the 24th Regiment of Foot.

At this point in our research we encounter another name that could foil family history researchers tracing the actor’s line. Captain Degacher, David Niven’s maternal grandfather, had not been born with that surname. At his birth he had been William Hitchcock who, with his own father and brother, assumed the surname of their mother, Degacher, in 1874, which was two years before the birth of his daughter. While it is not necessary to formally change a name to begin using another, and so create a record, it is worth checking to see if the adoption of a different name is recorded by checking the Index to Changes of Names records on TheGenealogist. Here we see that in this case the name change was by deed poll.

In 1928, David Niven also decided to make the army his first career. He attended the Royal Military College, Sandhurst from where he graduated in 1930 with a commission as a second lieutenant in the British Army. Rising to the rank of lieutenant in the Highland Light Infantry, by 1933 he decided that the peacetime army had little prospect for him to advance within and so he sailed for America in December 1933 and resigned his commission. He can be found within TheGenealogist’s collection of passenger lists when as a 24-year-old he sailed from England to North America. Once there he headed to New York where he unsuccessfully attempted a career in selling whisky.

Hollywood
After several abortive attempts at other jobs he crossed America to try his hand in Hollywood. At first he was rejected by Central Casting for not having a work permit and had to leave the United States to obtain one. Moving to Mexico he was employed as a ‘gun-man’, a job that involved cleaning and polishing the rifles of visiting American hunters. When he eventually secured his resident alien visa he went back to America and tried again. This time he was accepted by Central Casting and began getting bit parts in some of the 1930s films being produced in Hollywood. Towards the end of the decade Niven was now taking star parts in ‘A’ films. Then in 1939, on the other side of the world, Britain declared war on Germany. The very next day Niven made arrangements to return to the UK and rejoined the British Army – the only British film star of the time to do so.

In the war he served first in the Rifle Brigade before transferring to the Commandos. He also worked with the Army Film and Photographic Unit and made two films, The First of the Few and The Way Ahead, aimed at winning American support for the war before they had entered the fray. Promoted to temporary Lt-Colonel in 1944, Niven took part in the Allied invasion of Normandy, where he was sent to France as a member of a secret reconnaissance and signals unit which located and reported enemy positions.

It was while on leave in 1940 that he met the daughter of a London lawyer with aristocratic links. Primula ‘Primmie’ Susan Rollo and James D.G. Niven married on 19 September 1940 and from the Civil Registration Marriages index on TheGenealogist we discover that it was in Devizes, Wiltshire, near his new wife’s family home. His father-in-law, William Hereward Charles Rollo, warrants an entry in the Eton section of the Old Public School Boys Who’s Who 1933 in TheGenealogist’s Education records. Originally called to the bar as a barrister in 1914, W.H.E. Rollo then became a solicitor in 1921. While descended from a younger son of a peer – his grandfather was the 10th Lord Rollo of Duncrub – he married the only daughter of the 6th Marquess of Downshire and so Primmie had aristocratic relations on both sides of her family.

At the end of the war David Niven, his wife Primmie and their two sons – David, Jr. born in December 1942 and James Graham Niven, born in November 1945 – moved to Hollywood for the actor to continue his movie career. Tragedy struck when Primmie Niven died at the age of just 28, only six weeks after she and her young family had arrived in the States. Playing a game of hide and seek she had fractured her skull in an accidental fall in the Beverly Hills home of Tyrone Power in May 1946. It transpired that she had walked through a door believing it to be a closet, but instead it led to a stone staircase to the basement. David Niven was devastated.

In 1948, Niven then met the woman who would become his second wife, Hjördis Paulina Tersmeden (née Genberg, 1919–1997), who was a divorced Swedish fashion model. Their marriage took place in the upmarket district of Kensington, London as can be confirmed by searching the records on TheGenealogist.

The records have shown that notwithstanding the story of Niven’s claim to have been born in Scotland that he was, in fact, born in London. We have seen that his mother was born and baptised in Wales and that her family had changed their names by deed poll to adopt her maternal grandmother’s name. We have also been able to find some biographical details recorded about Sir Thomas Comyn-Platt, Niven’s stepfather, though nothing pointing to the reputed claim that he was actually the actor’s biological father. Other searches of TheGenealogist have thrown some light onto the aristocratic family of David Niven’s first wife and we have found that both of his marriages took place in England. This investigation has shown how using some of the range of record sets on TheGenealogist can add substance when researching an individual’s family story.