Ronald Colman: A Durable Life

The actor Ronald Colman, known for his dapper mustache and his mellifluous speaking voice, left us in 1958. But lovers of old cinema classics still remember him fondly. I recall my parents chuckling over their memories of 1947’s The Late George Apley and my mother developing a romantic fascination with Shangri-La, thanks to a hit Colman film from 1937, Lost Horizon. I’ve also come across Carol Burnett’s rambunctious take on a 1942 Colman romantic weepy, Random Harvest. (Burnett’s version, called Rancid Harvest, has heaps of fun with the story of a British ex-soldier, suffering from amnesia, who has totally forgotten his marriage to perky Greer Garson.) 

Colman’s film career, which stretched from the silent era to 1957, gave him a wide variety of roles. He was a courtly would-be lover in Lady Windermere’s Fan, a silent adaptation of the Oscar Wilde play directed back in 1925 by the great Ernst Lubitsch. He starred as a soldier, a jewel thief, a heroic doctor, an esteemed law professor, and a painter who has gone blind.  After multiple Oscar nominations, he finally took home the golden statuette in 1948 for A Double Life, in which he played a Broadway actor so caught up in his portrayal of Othello that he nearly murders his on-stage Desdemona. 

How to take in the whole scope of Colman’s illustrious career? My exceedingly prolific colleague Carl Rollyson has written a Colman biography, published in 2024, that’s both extremely thorough and unique in its focus. He has titled it Ronald Colman: Hollywood’s Gentleman Hero. Rollyson’s book contains the elements of many classic biographies: a timeline, a photo section, several useful appendices, a list of sources, and so on. But Rollyson chooses not to start with the familiar cradle-to-grave narrative. Instead, he devotes the long first section of his book to what he calls “A Gentleman’s Work.” Starting with the classic eighteenth-century delineation of gentlemanly behavior in Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison, he considers Colman’s film career as a creative working out of an English gentleman’s approach to life. Not that Colman always plays an Englishman; not that he’s wholly typecast as a wealthy aristocrat. Rollyson sees in Colman’s film roles an exploration of truly gentlemanly behavior, often featuring a character who must repent of his flaws and find true nobility within  himself. (Colman’s Sydney Carton in 1935’s A Tale of Two Cities certainly rises to the occasion as he heads toward the guillotine.) A particularly interesting section focuses on Lost Horizon, in which Colman’s role as an esteemed British statesman who becomes entranced by the promise of a life of seclusion and peace becomes, in his daughter’s words, “Ronald Colman stepping into his own image.”   

After thoroughly exploring the implications of Colman’s career, Rollyson delves deeply into the life itself, helped by input from Hollywood colleagues and from Colman’s daughter Juliet, who in 1975 probed her late father’s psyche in Ronald Colman: A Very Private Person. My favorite discovery is that Colman and his second wife, English actress Benita Hume, had a long, loving, exceedingly playful relationship, one captured in their popular radio broadcast, The Halls of Ivy (1950-52). The show briefly moved to television, but radio was their favorite medium as a couple, because in their later years it gave them more time for friends and for one another. And—who would have thought it?—the pair had a ball playing themselves as supposed next-door-neighbors of the cheap and cranky Jack Benny. He featured them frequently on his own radio broadcasts, with Benny heckling a dignified but prickly Colman, and Benita desperately striving to keep the peace. 

 

Ronald Colman: A Far Far Better Man?

My esteemed colleague Carl Rollyson is probably one of the busiest biographers around. While publishing some thirty-five books, many of them biographies of eminent literary figures like Faulkner and Sylvia Plath, he is also a retired professor, a book editor, a reviewer, a podcaster, and a chronicler of movieland royalty. I happen to know that he’s currently deep into a biography of Ronald Colman,  the British actor once revered for his mellifluous voice, his neat mustache and his gentlemanly manner. My parents loved Colman in Lost Horizon  (1937) and The Late George Apley (1947). He won an Oscar for A Double Life, also 1947.  Trying, in my way, to keep up with Carl, I’ve just watched two Colman oldies, Random Harvest (1942) and A Tale of Two Cities (1935).

 Random Harvest is based on a popular novel by James Hilton. I have no idea what that title means, but it features a British officer who has left the battlefields of World War I with a serious case of amnesia. There’s a poignant scene, early on, wherein an elderly couple from the hinterlands arrives at Colman’s British sanitarium,, hoping he’ll turn out to be their missing son. He hopes so too . . . but he’s not. Desperate to make something of his life, he sneaks out into the local town, and is promptly taken in tow by a lively young music-hall singer (Green Garson). Soon he learns to forget his missing past and forge a new life with her. But wait! Tragedy strikes again! While hurrying to a job interview he’s hit by a passing taxi . . . and his memories of his past return to him. He now knows he’s the beloved scion of a wealthy family, and they can’t wait to fold him into their posh existence. That’s fine with him, because he’s completely forgotten his marriage to Garson and their happy days in a cozy Midlands cottage. Soon he’s an important figure in the business world. But Garson, undaunted, signs on as his loyal secretary and waits for him to remember their life together. The plot thickens from there.

 Though Colman is fine as the stalwart but confused soldier, the film is really Greer Garson’s. In the novel, the reader doesn’t know that Paula Ridgeway and Margaret Hanson are the same person. But this would hardly have worked on film with a face as familiar as Garson’s. So in playing the secretary she conveys a secret yearning that works beautifully. (She won an Oscar for that same year’s Mrs. Minniver.)  Carol Burnett fans will enjoy her spoof of this film, Rancid Harvest (see below).

 I was more impressed by Colman’s leading man chops as Sydney Carton in one of David O. Selznick’s literary adaptations, A Tale of Two Cities. This typically convoluted and schmaltzy Charles Dickens novel about the French Revolution was somehow condensed by screenwriters W.P Lipscomb and S.N. Behrman (the latter famous for sophisticated comedies) into a brisk two hours. It’s an MGM “cast of thousands” extravaganza, with a horde of extras marching through the streets of a backlot Paris to tear down prison walls. (There was a well-deserved Oscar nomination for editing, as well as one for best picture.) The acting is theatrical, to put it kindly, but Blanche Yurka as Mme. Defarge, crazed with her thirst for revenge against the “aristos,” stands out. I was surprised at the eventual Roger Corman-style catfight to the death between her and Edna May Oliver as the prim Miss Pross, but it’s in the novel. Amid all this, Colman’s tortured and unlikely hero won’t soon be forgotten.