Raymond Massey

Raymond Hart Massey was a Canadian actor. Born in Toronto, Ontario, he was the son of Chester D. Massey, the wealthy owner of the Massey-Ferguson Tractor Company. He attended Appleby College[1] in Oakville, Ontario, Upper Canada College, and graduated from university at University of Toronto and Balliol College, Oxford.

Early in Massey's career, the late President Abraham Lincoln's son, Robert Todd Lincoln (1843-1926), heard Massey perform and was struck by the close similarity of Massey's speaking voice to that of his father.

Despite being Canadian, Massey became famous for his quintessential American roles, as Abraham Lincoln in 1940's Abe Lincoln in Illinois (for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor), in 1940's Santa Fe Trail, in which he played abolitionist John Brown, and as Lincoln again in 1962's How the West Was Won. He only played a Canadian on screen once, in Forty-Ninth Parallel (1941).