Early Life
Born as Philip St. John Basil Rathbone in Johannesburg to English parents, Edgar Philip Rathbone, a mining engineer and scion of the Liverpool Rathbone family, and Anna Barbara (née George), a violinist, he had two older half-brothers, Harold and Horace, as well as two younger siblings, Beatrice and John. The Rathbones fled to England when Basil was three years old after his father was accused by the Boers of being a British spy near the onset of the Second Boer War at the end of the 1890s.
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