Thursdays in November | 27 Movies
With his dark eyes, voice like crushed velvet and brooding screen presence, James Mason began his film career playing intelligent, damaged men filled with torment and a tendency towards violence, but who, nevertheless, had a dangerous sexual appeal. Although his upper-class accent would eventually ‘type’ him, James Neville Mason was born into a middle-class family on May 15, 1909, in the Yorkshire town of Huddersfield, world-renowned for its wool industry. His father was a textile merchant who wanted all three of his sons to join him in the family business but allowed his youngest, James, to pursue architecture at Cambridge University. While there, Mason dropped his Yorkshire accent and gained an interest in acting after a fellow member of the Cambridge rowing team got him into a play. “That sort of seduced me or suggested that there might be something I might do more successfully than being an architect.” Graduating amid the Great Depression in 1931 proved him right, as there were few opportunities for architects in such a bad economy.
He got his first paid acting job in a repertory company and played in various theaters around the country and Ireland before being spotted by theatrical producer Tyrone Guthrie, who invited him to join the Old Vic troupe he was forming, which included Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester. This led to films in 1935, where he appeared in both low-budget and occasional “A” pictures like Alexander Korda’s The Return of the Scarlet Pimpernel (1937). While not working in film, Mason participated in several live experimental television dramas, like Cyrano de Bergerac, for the BBC. In 1939, with World War II on the horizon, he tried to register as a conscientious objector. “I had a notion that wars and the horror of wars would only be stopped if people actually stopped - individually stopped - taking part in them.” Since Mason was over 30, he was exempt from service as long as he remained employed in films. He donated a portion of his salary to refugee relief and entertained the troops during the war and after for the American Red Cross, but his decision to stay out of the fighting estranged him from his parents for over a decade.
His career gained momentum at Gainsborough Pictures in the early 1940s with roles that cemented his image as an anti-hero. Many of them were costume melodramas co-starring Margaret Lockwood, like The Man in Grey (1943), whose overwhelming success earned Mason and the film Picturegoer magazine’s Gold Medal in 1944. Mason played similar suave villain roles in Fanny By Gaslight (1944) and The Wicked Lady (1945) before leaving Gainsborough. He made himself unpopular in the industry by writing a series of articles in fan magazines criticizing both the British film industry for lacking glamor and powerful mogul J. Arthur Rank as “not the man to run our business in a boss kind of way because he didn’t know anything about making pictures.” Mason’s first film after leaving Gainsborough was one of his most famous, The Seventh Veil (1945), in which he plays the controlling guardian of pianist Ann Todd. Todd later told an interviewer, “James started off a new sort of fashion completely. […] I believe he was called ‘The Star They Loved to Hate.’ But they really didn’t hate him, they adored him. Nobody’d done a part like that before and Mason came along and broke the idea of what had gone on before and came over with tremendous sex.” The film became an international hit, surpassing the success of the Gainsborough films, and Mason would later name The Seventh Veil and another film, Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out (1947), the best he made during that period. Reed (who Mason called his favorite director) allowed him to break from type by playing a modern-day IRA leader fleeing the police in Belfast. “I had an enormous admiration for Carol Reed and the entire team of people involved in it were consummate artists. I would not have been offered this beautiful thing to do if I had not already popularized myself by playing in some films in which I have no great regard, but they had brought my name into prominence.”
Despite his popularity, Mason knew that he was still several levels down in the British film industry hierarchy below Laurence Olivier, Rex Harrison and David Niven, and chafed at the lack of control over his career and the parts he played. He concluded that the only way to get that control would be to become an international star and left for Hollywood in 1947. Mason’s troubles began at the start when he was involved in a legal dispute with an agent and could not make films until it was resolved, which took nearly two years. He didn’t know, nor had any interest in playing the Hollywood game or playing up to the press, so when Mason refused an interview with gossip columnist Louella Parsons, she lashed out. “Louella started knocking me on her radio program. According to Hollywood patterns, I should have come crawling. I wasn’t looking for publicity because I couldn’t’t work. They started knocking me and that’s how I became a bad boy.”
Mason also made mistakes in his choice of roles. “Unfortunately, my taste guided me unerringly to projects which were artistically unadventurous and financially hazardous, so my American career started with a run of five failures.” Some of his earliest Hollywood films included Max Ophül’s 1949 films Caught and The Reckless Moment, and Madame Bovary (1949) and East Side, West Side (1949) at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. He would later describe working at MGM in less than glowing terms, saying “The whole atmosphere of the place suggested a military junta.” Twentieth Century-Fox did “far better work,” in his opinion, but he still referred to the studio as “Penitentiary Fox.” Mason did not want to be part of the Hollywood system in which an actor dutifully took whatever role the studio assigned without argument. “On the one hand, I shrank from being typecast or of becoming in the long-term thrall of a major studio, on the other, I wished to involve myself in filmmaking of every variety and ultimately to become my own producer.” Later in his life, he would say that to be a big star, an actor “should settle for an image and polish it forever. I somehow could never quite bring myself to do that.”
To help revive his shaky career, Mason signed a contract with Fox to star as German General Erwin Rommel in The Desert Fox (1951), which he had wanted to purchase the rights to produce himself after reading Desmond Young’s biography but found that writer Nunnally Johnson had already acquired it and had developed a screenplay. Back at MGM, he would play Rupert of Hentzau in The Prisoner of Zenda (1952) and Brutus opposite Marlon Brando in the successful Julius Caesar (1953). He would reunite again with Carol Reed for The Man Between (1953) before Judy Garland and her husband, Sid Luft, approached him to play in their remake of A Star is Born (1954). Garland and Luft had originally wanted Cary Grant to play Norman Maine, but Warner Bros. could not come to a financial agreement. Mason immediately took the part, later saying, “When you read a good script, and this was a really beautiful, witty script of those times, you can't help thinking that this could make a wonderful film.” Mason was likewise happy with Garland, despite her personal issues that sometimes interfered with filming. “If you do something like that, in my book of rules, you shouldn’t bitch if you have a few bad days.” He also appreciated director George Cukor, who he ranked “at the top of the list of the few really gifted directors I've worked with." Although nominated, he did not win the Academy Award for Best Actor, but he did win the Golden Globe. He would always speak highly of the film, saying A Star is Born was one of the few movies of his that he would watch on television.
He returned to a purely villainous role in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959), which he enjoyed, but found less than artistically fulfilling due to the director’s habit of storyboarding his films in advance. “He knew exactly how it was going to be staged. He chose his actors as though they were props. We got along fine. He had a certain regard for his props.” That same year, Mason reportedly suffered a serious heart attack, from which he recovered. Three years later, he took on the most controversial role of his career, as the pedophile Professor Humbert Humbert in Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita (1962), based on the novel by Vladimir Nabokov, which Mason had read and enjoyed. Kubrick approached Mason when Laurence Olivier, David Niven and Noël Coward all turned it down. “When I first heard Kubrick and his partner were going to make it, I didn’t expect them to pick on me as their first choice, and indeed, they didn’t. But the time came when they did and I had absolutely no hesitation in accepting it whatsoever.” Although the film’s subject matter of a middle-aged man falling in love with a teenage girl was sensitive, star Sue Lyon told an interviewer that she had no trouble making Lolita at the age of 14 because she had been protected by the cast and crew. “James Mason, who was such a wonderful man, he would come and say ‘Come on, kiddo, let’s go run the lines.’ He wasn’t running the lines for him, he didn’t need to do that, he wanted to make sure I was comfortable.”
In 1964, Mason had finalized a financially ruinous divorce and left Hollywood for Switzerland, where he would live for the rest of his life. He wanted to make films in Europe because he had grown professionally tired of Hollywood. “Looking at my career from the outside, it would be perfectly legitimate to say that I screwed up my career by going to Hollywood because I would have had, perhaps, a more interesting career if I’d stayed in England.” For the next two decades, he would sometimes work purely for the money if it was “a part I can play with honesty.” Mason would earn an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor in Georgy Girl (1966), and again for the last time in one of his final roles, in Sidney Lumet’s The Verdict (1982). Mason had worked with Lumet in four films, including The Sea Gull (1968), and the director considered Mason “one of the best actors who ever lived.”
James Mason played Dr. Watson opposite Christopher Plummer’s Sherlock Holmes in Murder by Decree (1979) and the two were planning to make a sequel together when Mason died of a heart attack on July 27, 1984. Plummer wrote that it was a “dreadful shock to everyone because he had always taken great care of himself and was up to this point in terrific shape.
What a horrendous loss to motion pictures, what an artist of the celluloid, capable of such profundity and grace, and what an amusing and warmhearted friend.”
