Claude Rains

Claude Rains was born into Cockney London poverty with a severe speech impediment and left school around the age of ten to work as a theatre call boy. That he transformed himself into the possessor of one of the most beautifully modulated voices in the English-speaking world is itself a story of will. He clawed his way up through the London and New York stage, teaching elocution and acting alike, before Hollywood called.

His film debut was a jest of fate: the title role in "The Invisible Man" (1933), in which audiences did not see his face until the final shot yet fell in love with his voice for eighty minutes. It made him a star of a peculiar kind, a leading character actor whose instrument was sound and insinuation.

What followed was one of the great supporting careers. He was the smoothly villainous senator in "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" (1939), the tormented Nazi husband in Hitchcock's "Notorious" (1946), the fragile aristocrat of "Mr. Skeffington" (1944) and the doomed conductor of "The Phantom of the Opera" (1943). Above all he was Captain Louis Renault in "Casablanca" (1942), the deliciously amoral Vichy police chief whose closing line, and whose walk into the fog beside Bogart, gave the film its perfect grace note. He made corruption charming and redemption believable in the same breath.

Rains was nominated for the Academy Award four times and, in one of Hollywood's stranger oversights, never won. Directors prized him because he could hold the screen against anyone while seeming to give the scene away; he understood that power on film comes from restraint. Late in life he brought that authority to "Lawrence of Arabia" (1962) as the wily diplomat Dryden, still peerless at forty years' distance from the stage.

Married six times and privately restless, he retired to a New Hampshire farm and died in 1967. He remains the standard by which the intelligent screen villain and the civilized rogue are measured, an actor who proved that the finest instrument an actor owns is a voice used with total control.