Arthur Melbourne Hooper was neither of these things, however, he was a relative of one of the cast members. In fact, he was actually Tom Ellis’s (who plays Lucifer Morningstar) maternal grandfather, who sadly passed away last year, 2020.
Today my Grandfather Arthur Melbourne Hooper went to be with Jesus. He was 99 years old, 2 months shy of 100. He was one of the most generous, gentle and godly men I have ever known. He prayed for me and my family every day and I’m incredibly grateful to have had him in my life.
Arthur Melbourne Cooper (15 April 1874 – 28 November 1961) was a British photographer and early filmmaker best known for his pioneering work in stop-motion animation.
Arthur was the son of Gratton Melbourne Hooper and Minnie Ford, Ellis’s great grandparents – Gratton was born in Cheddar, Somerset, England, the son of George Hooper and Ellen Pipe. READ MORE: Lucifer season 5: Fans in frenzy as key Maze scene teased on Twitter [INSIGHT]
Where is Melbourne Cooper buried?
Melbourne-Cooper retired in 1940 and moved to Coton, Cambridgeshire, where he died in 1961; he is buried in the cemetery of St Peter’s Church, Coton alongside his wife, who died in 1962.
With his assets of the Alpha Trading Company and capital of a semi-retired officer, Andrew Heron, Cooper established Heron Films Ltd., a company which set out to produce longer films, comedies and dramas, with the theatrical company of Mark Melford, a well-known actor in those days.
By 1906 Cooper had established the Alpha Trading Company, and started film production in his own right. His productions at this time include MacNab’s Visit to London (1905), in which he plays the title role in a slapstick comedy about golf, and The Motor Pirate (1906), in which bandits in an armoured car make the roads unsafe. That year he also became one of the founder-members of the British Kinematograph Manufacturers Association.
In 1907 Cooper set out on a special observation car, attached to the front of a train to film the 3,000 feet (910 m) long phantom ride film London to Killarney (1907) which was one of the longest to have been made at that time and was distributed in four parts.
In 1955, Audrey Wadowska, the daughter of Cooper, attended an exhibition on film history in London, where she saw stills from a series of films credited to Brighton-based film pioneer George Albert Smith, which she claimed contained members of her family and must therefore have been filmed by her father. The series is known as the GRG-Series, after Grandma’s Reading Glass (1900); the significance of this particular film is its pioneering use of interpolated close-up. Wadowska’s campaigning, championed by Dutch researcher Tjitte de Vries, has resulted in the films being re-attributed to Cooper by New York’s Museum of Modern Art Film Archive, but other archives, including the BFI National Film and Television Archive, have not done the same.
Cooper also established Kinema Industries Ltd, for which he made several documentaries and newsreels, among which the notorious The Suffragette Derby of 1913 at Epsom, in which suffragette Emily Davison can be seen being trampled to death by the King’s racing horse.
On 27 July 1908 , Cooper opened Hertfordshire’s first permanent cinema, the Alpha Picture House, on London road. The building designed by Percival Blow contained a restaurant, swimming pool and hairdressing salon as well as the 800 seat cinema, which has been described as the first cinema as we know them today.
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