James Mason

James Mason was born in 1909 in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, and educated at Cambridge University, where he read architecture before turning to acting against his family's wishes. He built a stage career in Britain through the 1930s and became one of the country's biggest box-office draws of the wartime years in melodramas such as The Man in Grey (1943) and The Wicked Lady (1945), often cast as a brooding, cultivated cad. He moved to Hollywood in 1947 and spent the rest of his career working on both sides of the Atlantic, refusing to be typed as either purely British or purely American in his roles. His American period produced some of his most enduring work: he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor for A Star Is Born (1954) opposite Judy Garland, played Humbert Humbert in Stanley Kubrick's Lolita (1962), and portrayed the smooth, sinister spy Phillip Vandamm opposite Cary Grant in Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959). Mason worked prolifically into the 1980s, appearing in The Verdict (1982) opposite Paul Newman, for which he received his second Academy Award nomination, this time for Best Supporting Actor. He died in 1984 in Lausanne, Switzerland, having appeared in well over 100 films. His legacy rests on a distinctive quality rare among leading men of his generation: an ability to make intelligence itself seem dangerous, delivered in one of the most recognizable voices in film history, its clipped, purring cadence imitated by impressionists for decades.