Ronald Colman

Born in Richmond, Surrey, into a comfortable family thrown into hardship by his father's early death, Colman worked as a clerk, served in the First World War, and was wounded at Messines, an injury that left him with a lifelong slight limp he learned to disguise. He drifted into the British stage, then emigrated to America, where his dark good looks and soulful reserve made him a silent-film matinee idol in romantic dramas opposite Vilma Banky.

Many silent stars dreaded the microphone; Colman was made by it. His voice, a warm, cultivated, faintly melancholy English baritone, became one of the most beloved sounds in cinema, and it carried him effortlessly into the sound era. He specialized in men of honor and sacrifice, the gentleman-adventurer and the noble sufferer, and he wore that idealism without a trace of pomposity.

His great roles form a gallery of romantic heroism: the self-sacrificing Sydney Carton going to the guillotine in A Tale of Two Cities (1935), the seeker who finds Shangri-La in Lost Horizon (1937), and the dashing double role in The Prisoner of Zenda (1937). He was the amnesiac husband of the aching wartime weepie Random Harvest (1942), a performance of great tenderness. Selective and dignified, he chose quality over quantity as his career matured.

His finest hour as an actor came late, playing an actor undone by his own role as Othello in A Double Life (1947), a study of a mind dissolving into the part it plays; it won him the Academy Award for Best Actor. In his later years he charmed a new audience on radio and television with light comedy alongside his wife, Benita Hume. He died of a lung ailment at sixty-seven. He remains the very image of a vanished screen ideal: the courtly, wounded, impossibly civilized romantic hero.