James Mason(1909–1984)

James Neville Mason was born at Croft House, Marsh, Huddersfield on 15 May 1909, the youngest of three sons of John Mason, a textile-yarn merchant of substantial means in the Yorkshire wool trade, and Mabel Hattersley Gaunt. The family money sent him to Marlborough College in Wiltshire as a public-school boarder from thirteen and to Peterhouse, Cambridge to read architecture from eighteen. He took the Cambridge degree in 1931. He had also taken every part the Cambridge Festival Theatre would give him through his three undergraduate years, on the side, and decided in the year of his graduation to drop the architectural training entirely. He joined the Old Vic-Sadler's Wells company in 1933 at twenty-four, played supporting roles in the classical repertory through the 1933-34 season, and was the leading man at the Gate Theatre in Dublin under Hilton Edwards through 1934 and 1935.

The British cinema in the late 1930s and the war years was, by industrial necessity, the working-actor's market. He took his first lead role in *Late Extra* at Twickenham Studios in 1935, worked through the quota-quickie production system of the rest of the decade in twenty-eight films across five years (the apprenticeship of the technique), and reached the top of the British box office in 1944 with the Gainsborough costume melodrama *The Man in Grey* opposite Margaret Lockwood and the title-role in *Fanny by Gaslight*. The decisive picture was Sydney Box's *The Seventh Veil* (1945), the psychiatric romance in which he played the cruel guardian of Ann Todd's concert-pianist heroine, a part the British exhibitor magazine *Kine Weekly* voted the most-popular performance by a male actor in any British film of that year. By the end of 1946 he was the highest-paid actor in British cinema, with a working-fee of forty-five thousand pounds a picture against the Hollywood-rate-card maxima of seventy-five thousand for the top American stars. He left for Hollywood in 1947.

The Hollywood years were the establishment of the international career. He played Brutus to Marlon Brando's Mark Antony in Joseph Mankiewicz's *Julius Caesar* (1953), Norman Maine to Judy Garland's Vicki Lester in the George Cukor *A Star Is Born* (1954, first Best Actor Oscar nomination), the Captain Nemo of Disney's *20,000 Leagues Under the Sea* (1954), Phillip Vandamm in Hitchcock's *North by Northwest* (1959), Humbert Humbert in Stanley Kubrick's *Lolita* (1962, on a script Vladimir Nabokov had to be persuaded that Kubrick was not going to ruin), the East-German spymaster in Anthony Asquith's *The V.I.P.s* (1963), and the headmaster who turns out to have got the headmistress pregnant in Silvio Narizzano's *Georgy Girl* (1966, second Best Actor Oscar nomination). The American studios picked him for almost every literate-but-cruel-Englishman role of the 1950s and 1960s, and he was the answer to the box-office casting question of how to put a English-villain figure into an American production.

He married the actress Pamela Kellino, the wife of his agent Roy Kellino, in 1941; the marriage produced two children (the actress Portland Mason and the writer Morgan Mason) and ended in 1964 in an acrimonious divorce that ran through the Los Angeles courts for two years over the distribution of his very substantial accumulated film fees and the custody of the children. He married Clarissa Kaye, the Australian actress, in 1971; the second marriage was the long settled one of his last twelve years. He moved to Corsier-sur-Vevey on the Lake of Geneva in 1962 and lived there until his death; the move was partly for tax (the post-Pamela divorce settlement had been crippling) and partly because the late-1960s work that the American studios were now offering him was as often European as American (the Italo Calvino-adapted *Cold War in a Country Garden*; *Mayerling* in Vienna; *The Last of Sheila* in the French Riviera).

The third Best Actor Oscar nomination came at seventy-three for the alcoholic Boston defence lawyer Frank Galvin in Sidney Lumet's *The Verdict* (1982). He lost on the night to Ben Kingsley for *Gandhi*. He worked on at the Vevey house for a further two years, made his last film (*The Shooting Party*, an Edwardian-country-house picture in which he played the murdered host) in late 1983, and died of a heart attack at the clinic at La Tour-de-Peilz on Lake Geneva on 27 July 1984, seventy-five years old. He is buried in the cemetery at Corsier-sur-Vevey, half a mile from the Chaplin family vault. The Mason name in the English-side catalogue is the medieval occupational surname for the stone-mason, the worker in cut and set stone; he carried it from a Huddersfield woollen-yarn family into the Hollywood lead-actor system of the 1950s and 1960s.