JACK HAWKINS and JAMES MASON: Celebrities of Stage and Screen (2)

[This is the second in an occasional series describing British actors and performers who achieved fame in the theatre or in the movies.]

Britain had its particular brand of matinee idol in the 1940s and 1950s, usually a handsome and masculine type with a distinctive voice. The two actors I here describe fall into that category, the first remaining a quintessentially British figure, while the second made a successful transition to Hollywood and to a wider audience. They are two of my favourites.

Jack Hawkins

Jack Hawkins (1910- 1973) with his craggy good looks and searching eyes was usually cast as the upright, stiff-upper-lipped Englishman with his strong sense of duty and not much time for frivolity. He played a loving but undemonstrative husband and a guiding father. In real life he was notably liberal and soft-hearted, far away from his film persona. 

Hawkins, born in Wood Green, London, was educated at the Italia Conti drama school, making his West End debut at the age of 12 in Where the Rainbow ends and his Broadway debut aged 18. He was a journeyman stage and film actor for some years and did not get into his stride until the 1950s.

Hawkins as Captain Ericson in The Cruel Sea

Hawkins appeared in a succession of movies as a police superintendent, The Long Arm (1956) and Gideon of Scotland Yard (1958) as a rubber planter fighting off Malayan communists in The Planters Wife (1952), as the father of a beloved deaf-mute girl in Mandy (1953), as a fighter pilot in Angels One Five (1953) as an Army officer in Malta Story (1956). Hawkins’ career-defining role was in The Cruel Sea (1953) as Captain Ericson of a convoy-protecting corvette warship, agonising over his duty to drop depth charges on an attacking U-boat despite the certainty of killing torpedoed British sailors struggling in the water. The film, adapted from a successful novel by Nicholas Monserrat, was a huge success in the UK and Hawkins was voted the top film star in 1954.

Hawkins was the leading man in The League of Gentlemen (1960) a thriller about a group of unreconciled ex-servicemen executing a bank heist. Hawkins’ entrance from a manhole, dressed in his tuxedo, anticipated James Bond.

Hawkins emerges from a manhole in The League of Gentlemen

Hawkins was evolving into a character actor – he was again an army officer in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) - but a professional tragedy was stalking him. A 60-a-day smoker, his voice began to fail and his larynx with it. He struggled on, performing splendidly as General Allenby in Laurence of Arabia (1962) and as a pacifist preacher in Zulu (1964). Latterly Hawkins had an artificial larynx fitted and his voice was dubbed by other actors. He died after another larynx operation in 1973: he was only 62. A comforting and reliable presence, his passing was much lamented by his British audience.

Hawkins as Allenby in Laurence of Arabia

My second actor is James Mason (1909-1984), the son of a wealthy wool merchant in Huddersfield, he was educated at Marlborough and Peterhouse, Cambridge. He rather drifted into acting, somehow joining the Old Vic in 1933 and learning his trade under Tyrone Guthrie. He appalled his family by claiming to be a conscientious objector when WW2 broke out, but his film work exempted him from combat anyway. His good looks and silken manner translated well to the screen and during the 1940s he was a major British star, topping the box office ratings in 1944 and 1945 on the back of rather ephemeral films like The Man in Grey (1943), bodice-ripper The Wicked Lady (1945) with Margaret Lockwood and the psycho-melodrama The Seventh Veil (1945).

A young James Mason

Mason drew international attention as the wounded gunman roaming Belfast in Odd Man Out (1947), although he did not neglect his British audience with Rommel, the Desert Fox (1952), 5 Fingers as the German spy Cicero and as the villainous Rupert of Hentzau in The Prisoner of Zenda (1952). His US breakthrough came with A Star is Born (1954), playing Norman, the wash-up alcoholic husband of his cherished Judy Garland, giving rise to that wonderful lump-in-the-throat final moment when, after his suicide, she introduces herself at the theatre “Good Evening, everybody, I am Mrs Norman Maine!”

Mason was not afraid of experimental cinema and he made two art-house films for Max Ophuls and he was a keen cinéaste, rescuing some old Buster Keaton reels and in later days making friends with an aged Charlie Chaplin. But the commercial cinema was his world and he graced Disney’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea as the crackpot Captain Nemo, narrowly escaping death in a battle with the tentacles of a giant squid. 

Perhaps his best known role was as the silky master-spy Vandamm in Hitchcock’s greatly entertaining North by Northwest playing opposite Cary Grant and Eva-Marie Saint.

Mason in North by Northwest

Mason settled in Switzerland in 1961 and with his first wife he was obsessively fond of cats, writing books about their odd feline ways. He kept up an international film career and was seen to advantage as the notorious Humbert Humbert in Lolita. With his precisely enunciated syllables and reserved style he was perfect as the lecherous nymphet-chasing anti-hero. Other less adventurous actors turned down this controversial opportunity.

He later made many films, some of indifferent quality, but he always brought distinction to his roles. In his later days, he was to be seen in Spring and Port Wine from Bill Naughton’s comic play, displaying a fine Northern accent as the paterfamilias of a Bolton family whose adventures and attitudes baffle and alarm him.

Mason died in 1984 and was buried in Switzerland, a few steps from Chaplin’s tomb. He had enjoyed a glittering career.

SMD

13.02.14

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2014