Claude Rains: An Actor's Voice

Abstract

David J. Skal will be familiar to many readers as the world's foremost authority on the classic Hollywood horror movie, and while Rains tried very hard not to be typecast in horror roles, he's still Griffin the Invisible Man, Sir John Talbot, and Erique Claudin, the deranged and disfigured virtuoso violinist, playing opposite that dullard Nelson Eddy in Arthur Lubin's The Phantom of the Opera (1943) (and yup, he's the best thing in it by a mile). Somebody should write a novel about this.) Though hampered by both a speech impediment and a cockney accent (we're talking the 1900s here, not the 1960s), Rains still managed to find himself attached to Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree's theatre company, as variously a gopher, a prompter, and eventually a bit-part player (after elocution lessons, for which Tree paid).

David J. Skal and Jessica Rains, Claude Rains: An Actor 's Voice Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2008

Claude Rains was one of the greatest actors ever to work in Hollywood, a supporting player so brilliant that he'd steal any film from under anybody. He was nominated four times for a Best Supporting Oscar, from 1940-47, should probably have won them all, but ended up with none. Although he did have a small role in one post-World War I British melodrama, the now-lost Build Thy House (1920), his screen career didn't really get started until he was well into his forties, when he made his Hollywood debut in James Whale's The Invisible Man (1932), an incredibly demanding role that required an actor who could command the screen by virtue of his voice alone. I doubt whether there are more than half a dozen actors in Hollywood history who could have pulled this off, but fortunately Rains was blessed with one of the greatest voices ever.

He was, alas, too short, too old, and probably much too good for leading man material, and so he spent the rest of his career essaying an astonishing series of indelible character roles. In Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939), he's the distinguished senior senator tempting greenhorn James Stewart with Mephistophelean realpolitik. In The Wolf Man (1941), he's Sir John Talbot, who has a son, Larry (Lon Chaney Jr) who is mysteriously twice his size and about the same age, and whom in a riotous Freudian crescendo he beats to death with a silver-tipped cane. He's easily the best thing in Now, Voyager (1942) (as a sympathetic shrink, Dr Jaquith), in Notorious (1946) (as a mother-loving Nazi), and in Deception (1946) (as an obnoxious composer). While he isn't the best thing about Casablanca (1942), that's only because the peculiar nature of that film's perfection means that no one element stands out over anything else. Nevertheless, his ironic cynicism precisely counterpoints Humphrey Bogart's romantic cynicism, and in a film on whose ending nobody seemed able to agree, it seems to me now that the only possible way it could have closed was with Rick and Louis walking off together at the 'beginning of [their] beautiful friendship' (to hell with lisa and Victor, those virtuous bores, let them go off on the plane together - Rick and Louis are meant for one another).

In his New Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson writes of Claude Rains: 'is there anyone more watchable, more delicate or acidic? ... It is amazing that this mix of decorum and wildness has not yet inspired a biography.' Well, it has now, at last. David J. Skal will be familiar to many readers as the world's foremost authority on the classic Hollywood horror movie, and while Rains tried very hard not to be typecast in horror roles, he's still Griffin the Invisible Man, Sir John Talbot, and Erique Claudin, the deranged and disfigured virtuoso violinist, playing opposite that dullard Nelson Eddy in Arthur Lubin's The Phantom of the Opera (1943) (and yup, he's the best thing in it by a mile). Over a hundred of the book's 290 pages are by way of notes, filmographies and indices, which leaves a rather brisk, sleek, and functional narrative of Rains's life - which is, of course, in many ways entirely appropriate for its subject. Skal whisks the reader along at a terrific pace, pausing occasionally for an engaging anecdote, a wry aside, or a brief, judicious critical assessment. If Captain Louis Renault himself had written a biography of Claude Rains, it might have come across a bit like this.

Claude Rains was born in 1889 in Camberwell, South London - which is not quite Brixton, where Alfred Hitchcock thought he was bom; nor quite Clapham, where Skal has him bom, though it's very close to both. Nor is it quite East Dulwich, a mile or two down the road, where Boris Karloff was born a couple of years earlier; nor quite Walworth, a couple of miles up the road, where Charlie Chaplin was born six months earlier. (I wonder if they ever crossed each other on the street? Somebody should write a novel about this.) Though hampered by both a speech impediment and a cockney accent (we're talking the 1900s here, not the 1960s), Rains still managed to find himself attached to Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree's theatre company, as variously a gopher, a prompter, and eventually a bit-part player (after elocution lessons, for which Tree paid). As an officer in the First World War, Rains was wounded in a mustard gas attack, which left him permanently blind in one eye, but which also changed the timbre of his voice forever (hard to believe that something so rich and beautiful owes its existence to such brutality). After the War, Rains became a distinguished feature on the London stage, specializing in Shaw, and in 1923 began to teach at RADA, where his pupils included John Gielgud, who thought he was brilliant, and Charles Laughton, with whom he had a more troubled history.

In some ways, Laughton and Rains are analogous figures - enormously talented British stage actors who went on to forge careers of unlikely and unconventional success in Hollywood, punctuated by occasional, memorable forays into horror. Laughton supported Boris Karloff in The Old Dark House (1932), which James Whale directed the year before The Invisible Man; he played Dr Moreau in The Island of Lost Souls (1932) and Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939); his one project as a director was of course that classic work of American Gothic, The Night of the Hunter (1955). In other ways, they are diametrically opposed. Laughton was a grotesque of monstrous appetites (he was an Oscar-winning Henry VIII in 1933), a hyperbolic barnstormer of an actor, and a man tormented by his homosexuality; while Rains was small and dapper, brought a meticulous precision and formality to everything he did, and was voraciously heterosexual (he had six wives, though Skal somehow makes it seem like rather more!). The notoriously insecure and defensive Laughton, fresh from his Oscar, was condescending about Rains's performance in The Invisible Man, exclaiming, 'Good God almighty, what did you do that for? A challenge? An extraordinary thing to do. I suppose you would accept a challenge like that.' When, later in the 30s, they met on the Universal lot, Laughton greeted Rains with a sneering 'Hello, you little shit.' They never spoke again.

Not that Rains wasn't himself insecure and tormented - he was an actor, after all. Standing 5'6", he was very conscious of his lack of stature, which he attempted to overcome by adopting an extremely formal bearing, and by brushing his hair backward in such a way as to add an extra inch or two to his height. When Rains made Notorious opposite the considerably taller Ingrid Bergman, Alfred Hitchcock suggested that he wear lifts for certain scenes, which he seems then to have done for the rest of his career. Perhaps stereotypically, he played a brilliant Napoleon on numerous occasions, on stage and screen. His womanizing, which seems compulsive, may have stemmed from insecurity, too. His drinking certainly did: by the 1950s, Rains was drinking very heavily, though it seems not to have affected his performances in any way, right up to very near the end of his life. He died in 1967, of complications brought on by cirrhosis of the liver. In 1971, his old friend and co-star Bette Davis (who was, Skal hints, in love with Rains from the start, though this was never consummated), was interviewed on American TV by Dick Cavett. Asked whether Claude Rains had been 'a happy person', Davis, not without demons of her own, said:

'As happy as ...[Pause] ... As a group, I don't think actors are what I'd call happy people. I think we're very moody people. I think we have great ups and great downs ... If something turns out badly you're depressed for days. I think we're terribly peculiar that way, and rather lonely people, actually. So Claude I could not say was a happy person. He was witty, amusing, and beautiful, really beautiful. And thoroughly enchanting to be with. And brilliant.'

Like all great actors, Claude Rains gave his own happiness over to his audience. Like all worthwhile subjects, Claude Rains ultimately eludes his biographer. But the best compliment I can pay David J. Skal's book is probably the best compliment I can pay to any film biography: it made me want to spend the next couple of months of my life watching the complete films of Claude Rains. I think I will.

DARRYL JONES