Robert Donat

Born in Withington, Manchester, to a Polish-immigrant father and an English mother, young Robert Donat took elocution lessons as a boy to cure a childhood stammer, and in doing so acquired one of the most gorgeous speaking voices ever heard on film, a warm, musical instrument he wielded with exquisite control. He toured the British provincial stage through his twenties before the movies made him a star.

Hollywood came calling early. He swashbuckled as the wronged hero of The Count of Monte Cristo (1934), but, homesick and wary of the studio machine, he returned to Britain and largely stayed. There he became the leading man of Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (1935), his charm and quick wit setting the mold for the debonair British thriller hero, and he gave a fine performance in King Vidor's adaptation of A. J. Cronin's The Citadel (1938).

His triumph came in Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939), as the shy schoolmaster Mr. Chipping, whom he aged with astonishing subtlety from a nervous young teacher into a beloved octogenarian institution. The performance won him the Academy Award for Best Actor in one of the strongest fields in Oscar history, defeating, among others, Clark Gable in Gone with the Wind.

He should have gone on to decades of glory, but chronic, severe asthma dogged him, forcing him to abandon roles and vanish for long stretches, and his output slowed to a trickle. A perfectionist tormented by ill health and self-doubt, he worked only sporadically through the 1940s and 1950s. His final film was The Inn of the Sixth Happiness (1958), in which he played a dying Chinese mandarin; his last spoken line, a farewell of "we shall not see each other again, I think," proved eerily true, for he died of a cerebral thrombosis, worn down by his lungs, at just fifty-three. He left a small body of work of nearly flawless quality.