RODDY MCDOWALL WAS IN AWE OF Claude Rains. Both were English actors transplanted to Hollywood, but somehow they had never met, socially or professionally. McDowall had started his American career as a juvenile performer for MGM, while Rains worked primarily for Warner Bros., and their paths had simply never crossed. McDowall was one of thousands of British children evacuated to America in 1940 during the Blitz. Rains had already been in the States for more than a decade, but at the height of World War II he had returned to London via military transport to give one of his signature screen roles in Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra. Their lives, careers, and screen personae couldn't have been more different, though they did have a few things in common. One was an elegant former juvenile star; the other, an elegant and mature character actor, one of the most celebrated in the world, who had begun his own career as a juvenile stage manager and performer. One was gay, the other straight—having lived through six marriages by the early 1960s when they finally met.
Offscreen, McDowall had become a noted photographer of Hollywood personalities, and he was especially eager for a portrait sitting with the man who had first electrified the world over thirty years earlier with his appearance (or disappearance) as The Invisible Man and who had gone on to act with distinction in a constellation of major films, including Anthony Adverse, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Casablanca, Now, Voyager, Mr. Skeffington, Notorious, Lawrence of Arabia, and dozens of others.
If it was a classic film, there was a good chance Claude Rains had something to do with it.
“He was perfect,” said McDowall. “There's this very small group of actors who seemingly never made a mistake: Walter Huston, Spencer Tracy, Henry Fonda, and Claude Rains. And if the material was minor they elevated it with incredibly shrewd invention. And if the material was major they just illuminated the author's intent right to the boundaries.”
McDowall and Rains met at the home of their mutual friend, actor Richard Haydn. Haydn, an accomplished comedian, kept up a steady stream of amusing patter during the shoot. “It isn't really difficult to photograph anybody on first encounter if you are engaged in conversation,” McDowall said. “To photograph Claude was like a dream come true. He was like a little pixie. He was laughing, which seldom happens in photographs. It was one of the great faces ever in the movies. It was also the most volatile face. I mean, the lines were so terrific, just terrific. It was like Mount Rushmore.”
About six months after their photo session, McDowall answered his doorbell in New York City. “And there was Claude Rains standing there. I said, come in, sit down, stay. Stay a decade if you want!” McDowall laughed. Rains had the photos McDowall had taken. Could he have some copies made? “I was thrilled. But, I asked, why didn't you just call me up? He said he wanted to ask me this favor in person. It was so sweet. And we sat for a couple of hours and talked. I remember an essence about him. He was then a very sad man. We talked about his wife, who had just died. And I think the photos reveal a lot of his wit and melancholia and also this tremendous fierceness, like a lion, that Rains had. Everything else seemed to float on top of it. It was always capped. But you knew that if you poked him he could wipe you off the face of the earth.”
Four decades earlier, Rains had another fervent acolyte in the person of John Gielgud, who was then a gangly, insecure acting student at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where Rains was his “primary and most inspiring” instructor. Both men's careers would gravitate from stage to screen. “Any actor who is very well trained in straight theatre can adapt very quickly to the movies if they have directors who are sympathetic,” said Gielgud. “I was very self-conscious in all my early films and very ashamed of them. But as Claude was a very showy actor, it must have been quite difficult for him to temper it down to exactly the right tempo. But he obviously knew exactly how to do it and learned it more and more as he went on. He was a self-made man like Richard Burton and Emlyn Williams who absolutely clawed his way into success by sheer willpower.”
Like many people who knew and worked with Rains, Gielgud considered the older man something of an enigma. “I never had a meal with him or went to any house where he lived or met him outside the theatre,” he said. But in 1950, when Rains made a triumphant return to Broadway in Darkness at Noon, Gielgud caught up with him after a performance. “I came across him all of a sudden one night, and he said he was very pleased to see me, and he said, ‘I'm writing my biography. I'm trying to write it and I'm being very hard on myself.’ So I think he had a very modest side to him as well as being enormously ambitious.”
Nothing of Rains's first attempt at a memoir has survived, except that he intended to call it Lost and Found, “the significance being,” he said, “that I was lost for many years. I was a wretched little boy, you know, with no education, and for the most part, still am.” He took another hopeless stab at a biography with his final wife, an unprofessional writer. But not long before his death, he began collaborating on another biographical project with San Francisco journalist Jonathan Root. Together they produced dozens of hours of audiotaped reminiscences. But Root died suddenly of a heart attack before the project could be realized, and Rains himself died soon after. The untranscribed tapes and fragmentary notes for the book were eventually purchased by the Rains estate.
Root faced many conundrums in dealing with Rains. As Gielgud noted, there was a strange combination of self-effacement and grandiosity about him. Although women threw themselves at him, he was nevertheless self-conscious about his height (five foot six), wore elevator shoes, and developed a way of brushing his hair to add an inch or so to his stature. It's not surprising he played Napoleon four times. Despite his lifelong craving for a stable family life, he was chronically unable to sustain most of his many marriages. He fought off inner demons, which he never acknowledged, with ever-increasing amounts of alcohol, seriously compromising his health. But to the outside world he was the picture of controlled elegance and savoir faire. As J. B. Priestley noted, “I can imagine an American filmgoer, seeing Claude Rains in one of his later Hollywood roles, as an autocrat or smooth villain, feeling certain that here was a man who must have left an aristocratic landed family, somewhere in England, to amuse himself making films.” That filmgoer would be startled to learn of Rains's almost Dickensian origins “on the wrong side of the river Thames,” his early, debilitating speech impediments, and his brief childhood career as a petty thief. And rather than being amused by his film work, Rains, one of the greatest character actors Hollywood ever produced, could not bear to watch his own screen performances. He had begun making movies out of financial necessity during the Depression, but his real passion was always the stage, and one senses a gnawing inner emptiness after he abandoned the theatre. Until the end of his life, his most vivid memories revolved around the world of live performance, its heady energies, and its bigger-than-life personalities.
In A Biographical Dictionary of Film historian and critic David Thomson comments on the many contradictions that fueled Rains's life and career, noting, “It is amazing that this mix of decorum and wildness has not yet inspired a biography.”
Finally, it has. Based primarily on his own recorded memories, combined with extensive new research and the recollections of his only child, the extraordinary life story of Claude Rains, in all its decorum and wildness, is presented here for the first time.
There was more to the Invisible Man than ever met the eye.