Claude Rains

William Claude Rains was born in London on 10 November 1889, the son of stage actor Frederick Rains. He grew up with a pronounced cockney accent and, according to biographical accounts, a stammer, both of which he worked to eliminate through years of voice training as he built a stage career in London beginning in the early 1900s, eventually working under and studying alongside figures at His Majesty's Theatre. He served in the London Scottish Regiment during the First World War and was gassed, which left a lasting effect on his voice — one that, combined with his training, produced the distinctive, cultivated diction for which he later became known. Rains built a substantial British and Broadway stage career through the 1920s before Hollywood took note of him relatively late, at age forty-three, and cast him — sight unseen by cinema audiences for most of the film — as the title character in The Invisible Man (1933), whose face remains hidden until the closing scene. The film established him in American pictures, and he became one of the era's most sought character actors, equally convincing as villains, corrupt officials and men of hidden decency. His most enduring roles came across the 1930s and 1940s: the crooked senator opposite James Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), and the morally ambiguous Vichy police chief Captain Renault in Casablanca (1942), whose closing line about "the usual suspects" became one of cinema's most quoted. He received four Academy Award nominations for Best Supporting Actor across his career and never won. He continued working into the 1960s, including a role in Lawrence of Arabia (1962). Rains died in Laconia, New Hampshire, on 30 May 1967, at seventy-seven.