Claude Rains: The Virtuoso

It was 1932 and Claude Rains was disenchanted.

He was at a crossroads in his life and his career. He'd tried his best to find work in the new fad, the Talkies, but the camera apparently disliked him. A recent screen test for RKO to play the part of Hilary Farfield in a film adaptation of Clemence Dane's A Bill of Divorcement had seemed promising. In his effort to show the extent of what he could do, Rains had pulled out all the stops for the test by performing scenes from two of his tour de force stage performances from The Man Who Reclaimed His Head and Shaw's Man of Destiny. In retrospect, Rains knew that he'd made "the worst screen test in the history of movie-making." The dramatically flamboyant part in the movie of Dane's play went to John Barrymore.

If his own assessment had been the last word on his career, who would have supplied the Machiavellian skill and cunning to his Don Jose scheming against Flora Robson's Queen Elizabeth in The Sea Hawk (1940), or brought a spark of lively warmth and humanity to what might have been a stock character in White Banners (1938) or Daughters Courageous (1939)? In the mid-forties, he would even flex his finely honed Shavian muscles to good effect on screen in very high style in Caesar and Cleopatra (1946), playing a worldly wise Julius Caesar to Vivien Leigh's kittenish Cleopatra. Chosen by George Bernard Shaw himself, (who would say that Rains and Sir Cedric Hardwicke were his favorite interpreters of his work), it must have been heartening for Rains--for once--to get the girl...Read More