Compton Mackenzie was born in West Hartlepool, England, into a theatrical family of Mackenzies, but many of whose members used Compton as their stage surname, starting with his grandfather Henry Compton, a well-known Shakespearean actor of the Victorian era. His father, Edward Compton, was an actor and theatre company manager; his sister, Fay Compton, starred in many of J. M. Barrie's plays, including Peter Pan.
He was educated at St Paul's School and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he graduated with a degree in modern history.
Sir Compton Mackenzie is perhaps best known for two comedies set in Scotland, the Hebridean Whisky Galore (1947) and the Highland The Monarch of the Glen (1941), sources of a successful film and a television series respectively. He published almost a hundred books on different subjects, including ten volumes of autobiography, My Life and Times (1963—1971). He also wrote history (on Marathon and Salamis), biography (Roosevelt), literary criticism, satires, apologia (Sublime Tobacco 1957), children's stories, poetry, and so on. Of his fiction, The Four Winds Of Love is considered to be his magnum opus. It is described by Dr John MacInnes (formerly of the School of Scottish Studies) as "one of the greatest works of English literature produced in the twentieth century."
He was an influence on the young F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose first book, This Side of Paradise, was written while under his spell.. Sinister Street, his lengthy 1913-14 bildungsroman, influenced the young and impressed established writers. Against the rules, George Orwell and Cyril Connolly read it as schoolboys. Max Beerbohm praised Mackenzie's writing for vividness and emotional reality Frank Swinnerton, literary critic, comments on Mackenzie's "detail and wealth of reference". John Betjeman said of it, 'This has always seemed to me one of the best novels of the best period in English novel writing.' Henry James thought it to be the most remarkable book written by a young author in his lifetime.
Following his conversion to Catholicism in 1914, he explored religious themes in a trilogy of novels, The Altar Steps (1922), The Parson's Progress (1923), and The Heavenly Ladder (1924). Following his time on Capri, socialising with the gay exiles there, he treated the homosexuality of a politician sensitively in Thin Ice (1956).
He was the literary critic for the London-based national newspaper Daily Mail.
Mackenzie also worked as an actor, political activist and broadcaster. He served with British Intelligence in the Eastern Mediterranean during the First World War, later publishing four books on his experiences.
He was president of the Croquet Association from 1953 to 1966. He was also president of the Siamese Cat Club
In 1923 he and his brother-in-law Christopher Stone founded The Gramophone, the still-influential classical music magazine.
Between 1913 and 1920 he lived with his wife on Capri, and returned to visit in later years. This Italian island near Sorrento was known to be tolerant not just of foreigners in general, but of artists and homosexuals in particular. Faith had an affair with the Italian pianist Renata Borgatti, who was connected to Romaine Brooks.
Compton Mackenzie's observations on the local life of the Italian islanders and foreign residents led to at least two novels, Vestal Fire (1927) and Extraordinary Women (1928). The latter, a roman à clef about a group of lesbians arriving on the island of Sirene, a fictional version of Capri,, was published in Britain in the same year as two other ground-breaking novels with lesbian themes, Virginia Woolf's love letter to Vita Sackville-West, Orlando, and Radclyffe Hall's controversial polemic The Well of Loneliness, but Mackenzie's satire did not attract legal attention.
He was friends with Axel Munthe, who built Villa San Michele, and Edwin Cerio, who later became mayor of Capri.
Mackenzie went to great lengths to trace the steps of his [ancestors back to his spiritual home in the Highlands, and displayed a deep and tenacious attachment to Gaelic culture throughout his long and very colourful life. As his biographer, Andro Linklater, commented, "Mackenzie wasn't born a Scot, and he didn't sound like a Scot. But nevertheless his imagination was truly Scottish."
He was an ardent Jacobite, the third Governor-General of the Royal Stuart Society, and a co-founder of the Scottish National Party. He was rector of University of Glasgow from 1931 to 1934, defeating Oswald Moseley, the Fascist leader, in his bid for the job.
Mackenzie was from 1920–1923 Tenant of Herm and Jethou. He shares many similarities to the central character in D. H. Lawrence's short story "The Man Who Loved Islands", despite Lawrence saying "the man is no more he than I am." Mackenzie at first asked Martin Secker, who published both authors, not to print the story, and it was left out of one collection.
Mackenzie built a house on the island of Barra in the 1930s. It was on Barra that he gained much inspiration and found creative solitude, and where he befriended a great number of people that he described as "the aristocrats of democracy". One such friend was John MacPherson, known as "The Coddy". MacPherson's son, Neil, recalled Mackenzie as a man of huge imagination, generosity, and talent.
He died in Edinburgh. Such was his love of the Scottish Highlands that he is buried in Barra.
Mackenzie was married three times. In 1905, he married Faith Stone, who died in 1960; then in 1962, he married Christina McSween – who died the following year. Finally, he married his dead wife's sister, Lillian McSween in 1965.
