James Mason(1909–1984)

James Neville Mason was born at Marsh, Huddersfield, on 15 May 1909, youngest of three sons of a Yorkshire wool-trade merchant. The family money sent him to Marlborough College and to Peterhouse, Cambridge to read architecture; he took the degree in 1931 but had played every part the Cambridge Festival Theatre would give him, and on graduating he dropped architecture for the stage. He joined the Old Vic company in 1933 and was leading man at the Gate Theatre in Dublin in 1934 and 1935.

He took his first film lead in 1935 and learned the technique across the quota-quickie production system of the late 1930s. He reached the top of the British box office in 1944 with the Gainsborough costume melodramas The Man in Grey and Fanny by Gaslight, and the decisive picture was The Seventh Veil (1945), voted the most popular male performance in any British film of its year. By the end of 1946 he was the highest-paid actor in British cinema, and in 1947 he left for Hollywood.

The Hollywood years built the international career. He played Brutus to Marlon Brando's Mark Antony in Mankiewicz's Julius Caesar (1953), Norman Maine opposite Judy Garland in Cukor's A Star Is Born (1954, his first Best Actor nomination), Captain Nemo in Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), the villain in Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959), Humbert Humbert in Kubrick's Lolita (1962), and the headmaster in Georgy Girl (1966, his second nomination). He was the actor the American studios reached for whenever a literate, commanding Englishman was required.

He married the actress Pamela Kellino in 1941 and the actress Clarissa Kaye in 1971, the second the long settled marriage of his last twelve years. He moved to Corsier-sur-Vevey on the Lake of Geneva in 1962 and worked increasingly across European as well as American productions through the 1960s and 1970s.

The third Best Actor nomination came at seventy-three for the Boston defence lawyer in Sidney Lumet's The Verdict (1982). He worked on at the Vevey house, made his last film, The Shooting Party, in 1983, and died on Lake Geneva on 27 July 1984, seventy-five years old. He is buried at Corsier-sur-Vevey. The Mason name, the medieval occupational surname for the worker in cut and set stone, carries him from a Huddersfield woollen-yarn family into the Hollywood lead-actor system of the 1950s and 1960s.