William Claude Rains was born on 10 November 1889 at 26 Tregothnan Road in Clapham, London.[3] His parents were Emily Eliza (née Cox) and stage actor Frederick William Rains.[4] He lived in the slums of London.[5] Rains was one of twelve children, of whom all but four died while still infants. His mother took in boarders in order to support the family. Rains grew up with a Cockney accent and a speech impediment.[6]
Rains in his captain's uniform during the First World War
Because his father was an actor, the young Rains would spend time in theatres and was surrounded by actors and stagehands. There he observed actors as well as the day-to-day running of a theatre. Rains made his stage debut at age 10 in the play Sweet Nell of Old Drury at the Haymarket Theatre, so that he could run around onstage as part of the production. He slowly worked his way up in the theatre, becoming a call boy (telling actors when they were due on stage) at His Majesty's Theatre and later a prompter, stage manager, understudy, and then moving on from smaller parts with good reviews to larger, better parts.
A 23-year-old Rains in one of his early theatre roles, 1912
Early career and military service
Rains moved to the United States in 1912 owing to the opportunities that were being offered in the New York theatres. However, at the outbreak of World War I in 1914, he returned to England to serve in the London Scottish Regiment,[7] alongside fellow actors Basil Rathbone, Ronald Colman, Herbert Marshall and Cedric Hardwicke.[8] In November 1916, Rains was involved in a gas attack at Vimy, which resulted in his permanently losing 90 percent of the vision in his right eye as well as suffering vocal cord damage.[9] He never returned to combat but continued to serve with the Transport Workers Battalion of the Bedfordshire Regiment, in which he was commissioned as a temporary lieutenant on 9 May 1917.[10] In March 1918, he was promoted to temporary captain,[11] the rank he held at the end of the war.[9] On 8 October 1918 he was appointed as adjutant,[12] and continued to serve in that role until March 1919.[13]
After his return to civilian life, Rains remained in England and continued to develop his acting talents. These talents were recognised by Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, the founder of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Tree told Rains that in order to succeed as an actor, he would have to get rid of his Cockney accent and speech impediment. With this in mind, Tree paid for the elocution books and lessons that Rains needed to help him change his voice. Rains eventually shed his accent and speech impediment after practising every day. His daughter Jessica, when describing her father's voice, said, "The interesting thing to me was that he became a different person. He became a very elegant man, with a really extraordinary Mid-Atlantic accent. It was 'his' voice, nobody else spoke like that, half American, half English and a little Cockney thrown in."[14] Soon after changing his accent, he became recognised as one of the leading stage actors in London. At age 29, he made his film debut, playing the role of Clarkis in his only silent film, the British film Build Thy House (1920).
I learnt a great deal about acting from this gentleman. Claude Rains was one of my teachers at RADA. In fact he was one of the best and most popular teachers there. He was extremely attractive and needless to say, all the girls in my class were hopelessly in love with him. He had piercing dark eyes and a beautifully throaty voice, although he had, like Marlene Dietrich, some trouble with the letter 'R'. He lacked inches and wore lifts to his shoes to increase his height. Stocky but handsome, Rains had broad shoulders and a mop of thick brown hair which he brushed over one eye. But by the time I first met him in the 1920s he was already much in demand as a character actor in London. I found him enormously helpful and encouraging to work with. I was always trying to copy him in my first years as an actor, until I decided to imitate Noël Coward instead.
Rains with Mary Kennedy in Camel Through the Needle's Eye on Broadway, New York City, 1929
Although he had played the single supporting role in the silent, Build Thy House (1920),[2] Rains came relatively late to film acting. While working for the Theatre Guild, he was offered a screen test with Universal Pictures in 1932. His screen test for A Bill of Divorcement (1932) for a New York representative of RKO was a failure but, according to some accounts, led to his being cast in the title role of James Whale's The Invisible Man (1933) after his screen test and unique voice were inadvertently overheard from the next room.[6][15] His agent, Harold Freedman, was a family friend of Carl Laemmle, who controlled Universal Pictures at the time, and had been acquainted with Rains in London and was keen to cast him in the role.[16][17] According to Rains' daughter, this was the only film of his he ever saw. He also did not go to see the rushes of the day's filming "because he told me, every time he went he was horrified by his huge face on the huge screen, that he just never went back again."
Rains signed a long-term contract with Warner Bros. on 27 November 1935, with Warner able to exercise the right to loan him to other studios and Rains having a potential income of up to $750,000 over seven years.[18] He played the villainous role of Prince John in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). Roddy McDowall once asked Rains if he had intentionally lampooned Bette Davis in his performance as Prince John, and Rains only smiled "an enigmatic smile." Rains later revealed to his daughter that he had enjoyed playing the prince as a homosexual, by using subtle mannerisms. Rains later credited the film's co-director Michael Curtiz with teaching him the more understated requirements of film acting, or "what not to do in front of a camera."[19] On loan to Columbia Pictures, he portrayed a corrupt but honourable U.S. senator in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), for which he received his first Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actor. For Warner Bros., he played Dr. Alexander Tower, who commits murder-suicide to spare his daughter a life of insanity in Kings Row (1942) and the cynical police chief Captain Louis Renault in Casablanca (also 1942). On loan again, Rains played the title character in Universal's remake of Phantom of the Opera (1943).
His only singing and dancing role was in a 1957 television musical version of Robert Browning's The Pied Piper of Hamelin, with Van Johnson as the Piper. The NBC colour special, broadcast as a film rather than a live or videotaped programme, was highly successful with the public. Sold into syndication after its first telecast, it was repeated annually by many local US TV stations.
Rains remained active as a character actor in the 1950s and 1960s, appearing in films and as a guest in television series. He played the ventriloquist Fabian on Alfred Hitchcock Presents Season 1 Episode 20 "And So Died Riabouchinska" which aired on February 10, 1956. He ventured into science fiction for Irwin Allen's The Lost World (1960) and Antonio Margheriti's Battle of the Worlds (1961). Two of his late screen roles were as Dryden, a cynical British diplomat in Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and King Herod in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), his last film. In CBS's Rawhide, he portrayed Alexander Langford, an attorney in a ghost town, in the episode "Incident of Judgement Day" (1963).
He was interested in the process (of film). He loved acting. When he came to California to do a film, I had to "hear him his lines" as he drove me to school every morning, 10 miles [16 km]. He knew everybody's part. He knew the whole script before he came out (to film). I don't think many people did that.
Bette Davis in an interview with Dick Cavett said about Rains:
Well, of course he petrified me. The first time I played with him was in Carlotta (Juarez), and I had to make an entrance [into] the King of France's domain for a rehearsal, and he's playing the King of France (N.B. The character is actually the Emperor of the French Napoleon III) in rehearsal. As all of us "other era people," we don't just run through lines and say "turn the camera", we rehearse beforehand...Anyway Claude and I couldn't, and he was the King of France who loathed Carlotta, and I was a kid and petrified of Mr. Rains, so I thought he hated me. I didn't know he was playing the character. I thought, he thinks I just stink! What am I going to do? Eventually we worked together quite a lot and became really great friends, really great friends.
Davis later went on to describe him: "Claude was witty, amusing and beautiful, really beautiful, thoroughly enchanting to be with and brilliant." She also praised his performances: "He was marvelous in Deception and was worth the whole thing as the picture wasn't terribly good, but he was so marvelous in the restaurant scene where he's talking about all the food...brilliant, and of course in Mr. Skeffington he was absolutely brilliant as the husband, just brilliant."
Claude Rains has to be considered one of the finest actors of the 20th century. As soon as you hear that marvelous, unmistakable voice of honey mixed with gravel, he becomes instantly recognizable. And that scornful right eyebrow which could freeze an adversary faster than and more effectively than any physical threat. He stood at a mere 5′6″, yet his enormous talent and immense stage presence made him a giant among his colleagues. During a stage and film career that spanned six decades, Rains encompassed some of the most memorable and exciting characters ever created by an actor. Villains were a Rains specialty, particularly those of a suave and sarcastic nature; and yet when the role called for it, Rains could be remarkably moving and even add a touch of pathos without losing any of his effectiveness.
In Twilight of Honor Rains played a retired lawyer acting as a mentor to Chamberlain's character. Reminiscing about his work with Rains, Chamberlain said:
He was in his seventies then and in failing health, yet he was charming and totally professional on the set. It was clear to us that he loved practicing his craft; he dazzled us all. Claude was an extremely private man—he never discussed his humble beginnings, his six marriages. But get him into a conversation about acting, and he opened up with delightful anecdotes and fascinating stories about his long life as a thespian.
One day on the set I mentioned to him that Notorious was one of my favorite films, and Claude related with amusement the filming of a particular scene with Ingrid Bergman. Rains was a very small man and Bergman was quite tall, so in order to shoot them in close-up together (in the key scene) the resourceful Alfred Hitchcock had a ramp installed, so as Rains approaches Bergman on camera he appears taller than his co-star. Claude found this ramp business a bit embarrassing and very funny.
I got another taste of Claude's witty nature shooting a scene in his [next-to-last] film, in which he had a long piece of dialogue. Generally he had no problem remembering his lines despite getting along in years. However, there was one particularly long scene shot late at night where he was having a lot of trouble with the dialogue, and kept making excuses. And finally he paused and said with a sheepish look "Alibi Ike, good old Alibi Ike" ("Alibi Ike" being an expression based on a 1935 film of the same name, in which the lead character has a penchant for making up excuses). Of course in the finished film he played the scene flawlessly, as he always did. Claude Rains: truly a class act, on and off screen.
Many years after Rains had gone to Hollywood and become a well-known film actor, John Gielgud commented, tongue-in-cheek:
There was somebody who taught me a very great deal at drama school, and I am certainly grateful to him for his kindness and consideration. His name was Claude Rains. I don't know whatever happened to him. I think he failed, and had to go to America.[24]
Gielgud later went on to recollect a time when he was in New York and in the audience during an event that included a focus on Bette Davis: "A number of clips from many of her most successful films were shown and I was particularly delighted, when, as soon as Claude Rains appeared in the close-up of one of the clips, the whole audience burst into a great wave of applause."
Bette Davis often cited Rains as one of her favorite actors and colleagues. Gielgud said that he once wrote that "The London stage suffered a great loss when Claude Rains deserted it for motion pictures," and that he later added, "but when I see him now on the screen and remember him, I must admit that the London stage's loss was the cinema's gain. And the striking virtuosity that I witnessed as a young actor is now there for audiences everywhere to see for all time. I'm so glad of that."
Personal life and death
The ivory military uniform Rains wore in Casablanca was sold at auction in 2011 for $55,000.[25]
He married six times and was divorced from the first five of his wives: Isabel Jeans (married 1913–1915); Marie Hemingway (to whom Rains was married for less than a year in 1920); Beatrix Thomson (1924–8 April 1935); Frances Propper (9 April 1935 – 1956); and the classical pianist Agi Jambor (4 November 1959 – 1960). In 1960, he married Rosemary Clark Schrode, to whom he was married until her death on 31 December 1964. His only child, Jennifer, was the daughter of Frances Propper. As an actress, she is known as Jessica Rains.[26]
He acquired the 380-acre (1.5 km2) Stock Grange Farm, built in 1747 in West Bradford Township, Pennsylvania (just outside Coatesville), in 1941. The farm became one of the "great prides" of his life.[27] Here, he became a "gentleman farmer" and could relax and enjoy farming life with his then wife (Frances) churning the butter, their daughter collecting the eggs, with Rains himself ploughing the fields and cultivating the vegetable garden. He spent much of his time between film takes reading up on agricultural techniques to try when he got home. He sold the farm when his marriage to Propper ended in 1956; the building now, as then, is still referred to by locals as "Rains' Place".[28] Rains spent his final years in Sandwich, New Hampshire.[29]
In his final years, he decided to write his memoirs and engaged the help of journalist Jonathan Root to assist him. Rains' declining health delayed their completion and with Root's death in March 1967 the project was never completed. A chronic alcoholic, Rains died from cirrhosis of the liver, having an abdominal hemorrhage in Laconia on 30May 1967, aged 77.[30] His daughter said, "And, just like most actors, he died waiting for his agent to call."[31] He was buried at the Red Hill Cemetery in Moultonborough, New Hampshire. He designed his own tombstone which reads "All things once, Are things forever, Soul, once living, lives forever".
In 2010, many of Rains' personal effects were put into an auction at Heritage Auctions, including his 1951 Tony award, rare posters, letters and photographs. Also included in the auction were many volumes of his private leather-bound scrapbooks which contained many of his press cuttings and reviews from the beginning of his career. The majority of the items were used to help David J. Skal write his book on Rains, An Actor's Voice. In 2011, the ivory military uniform (complete with medals) he wore as Captain Renault in Casablanca was put up for auction when noted actress and film historian Debbie Reynolds sold her collection of Hollywood costumes and memorabilia which she had amassed as a result of the 1970 MGM auction.[25]
Rains starred in multiple plays and productions over the course of his career, playing a variety of leading and supporting parts. As his film career began to flourish, he found less time to perform in the theatre in both England and America.
Soister, John T.; Wioskowski, JoAnna (2006). Claude Rains: A Comprehensive Illustrated Reference to His Work in Film, Stage, Radio, Television and Recordings (softcover) (Reprint ed.). Jefferson, NC: McFarland. ISBN978-0-7864-2855-7. OCLC41580407.
Skal, David J. (2008). Claude Rains: An Actor's Voice (hardcover) (First ed.). Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky. ISBN978-1-7200-3837-5. JSTORj.ctt2jcg4f.
Further reading
Alistair, Rupert (2018). "Claude Rains". The Name Below the Title : 65 Classic Movie Character Actors from Hollywood's Golden Age (softcover) (First ed.). Great Britain: Independently published. pp. 215–217. ISBN978-1-7200-3837-5.
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