Matthews grappled with Lee, on the same sets, in Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1965) and Rasputin the Mad Monk (1966). He was an eager assistant to Peter Cushing in Hammer's The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958), then played Boris Karloff's son in Corridors of Blood (1958), with Christopher Lee. His clean-cut qualities were also at work in several horror movies. He later told Gardner's biographer, Lee Server, that he was briefly involved with the star. Matthews's first film was the Raj tale Bhowani Junction (1956), directed by George Cukor for MGM, in which he played one of the men in Ava Gardner's life. For Durbridge, he first did My Friend Charles (1956), as a seemingly affable fellow revealed in the last episode to be a drug-dealing villain.
His television debut, for the BBC in its single-channel days, was in Prelude to Glory (1954). Following a countrywide tour with Dame Flora Robson in 1954 of No Escape, by the Welsh novelist Rhys Davies, Matthews made his West End debut in 1956. He first acted in a Bradford production of The Corn Is Green in 1945, before national service in the Royal Navy intervened. Visits to the theatre were a childhood highlight, and after a Jesuit education at St Michael's college in Leeds, his entreaties for backstage work at that city's Theatre Royal paid off. His Home Counties image notwithstanding, Matthews was a man of the north, born in York, to Henry, a shop steward at Rowntree, and Kathleen.
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