Ray Milland may be best known today for a series of cheesy and not-too-bad horror flicks he made at the end of his long career.  But, long before Milland shared Rosie Grier's body for American International Pictures, he was both a leading man in Hollywood and also a gifted supporting actor, the latter providing him the versatility that he would draw on to keep his career alive after many of his peers had retired from the silver screen.  Thus, in a way, Milland enjoyed two film careers in Tinseltown, or, as we prefer to call it...

By JOE WINTERS

(Note: This is the first installment in a series of three articles concerning the frightfully fabulous career of Ray Milland.   Parts Two and Three will follow in subsequent issues.)

From dashing, demonic and dapper to comedic, cultured and cantankerous, these are just some of the many characterizations of actor/director Ray Milland.

With a film career that spanned over half a century, Milland was one of those performers who evolved through one acting phase after another, and along the way secured stardom, respect and constant employment.

He was born Reginald Alfred John Truscott-Jones on a mountain called Cymla, above the Welsh coastal town of Neath in 1905. His father, mother and three sisters formed the middle class household. Wales was a land of music, mountains and mystery, according to Reggie, where every village has a witch.

In those days, Reggie’s world "was not a polluted world, but a world where gypsies camped and pheasants flew, and where children believed in Santa Claus." School was a three-mile hike down the mountain, great for homemade sleds on snowy days. His spinster aunt ran a large farm where she bred horses. It was there that young Reggie became an expert rider.

A part time job as an office boy with a shipping company "in the wild and perilous dock area known as Tiger Bay" led to a job as assistant to the first mate on a cargo ship and the opportunity to explore various ports of Europe.

At sixteen he was enrolled in King’s College, Cardiff. He furthered his education at a Cardiff branch of the University of Wales.

As a junior clerk in the offices of a steel mill, young Reggie spent some spare time chasing girls, drinking beer and taking up some boxing. He put his riding skills to use while serving as a guardsman in the Royal Household Calvary of London for three years. During a night on the town he met up with some theater people, and in 1929 had his first brush with the world of filmmaking.

It was his skill as a marksman that got him the part of the sharpshooter in The Informer (1929), the original and not the John Ford version of a few years later. Other small, uncredited roles would soon follow, but there remained the problem of the actor’s name, Reginald Truscott-Jones. It wouldn’t do. As he and the publicity people mulled over possible names, Reggie began yearning for home, to swim in the warm watered pools of the mill lands. And that’s how the last name "Milland" came to be. As for "Ray," his mother had given him a dressing case with the initial "R" on it, and so everyone eventually agreed on "Raymond" as his new first name.

While visiting the stage where Blackmail (1929) was being filmed, Raymond first met the film’s director. Milland described him as an egg-shaped individual with a pontifical manner who bowed with a slow seventeenth-century grace and said, "I am the director of this phantasmagoria and my name is Alfred Hitchcock." The two shook hands, Hitchcock wished Milland luck and said, "Now if you will excuse me, I must get back to the animals."

At that point according to Milland, "He stared at me, tossed his non-existent hair out of his eyes, and padded away." Milland left thinking "I’m out of my depth. I’ve got to get out of this business, because if they’re not mad, I must be." The two would work together a quarter of a century later, each by then acquiring considerably more fame and fortune.

Hollywood beckoned, and in the summer of 1930 Milland was on his way to the States to work at MGM. Small roles alongside big stars didn’t seem to be getting anywhere, but at least he met his future wife Mal, and the two would remain married for the rest of Ray’s life. In 1932 MGM dropped Milland’s option, and the actor took off for a visit to Wales. Returning to America, Milland went broke, and with the Depression under way he was about to go to work as an assistant manager at a Shell station, but fate was about to smile on Ray Milland.

About a hundred feet from the gate at Paramount Pictures, he ran into the studio’s casting director. They needed an English actor as an emergency replacement in a film called Bolero, and Welshman Ray was English enough. Other actors familiar with tough times were supportive, including John Carradine, who loaned Milland some dress gloves to go with the suit of the character Ray would be playing.

Milland claimed to be blessed with a fantastic memory, could read ten pages of a script and in five minutes know it perfectly. He remained with Paramount for 21 years and was occasionally loaned out to other studios, including Fox for a role as a suspect in Charlie Chan In London (1934).

Gradually working his way up the ladder with better parts in mysteries, musicals, comedies and dramas, he got his own chance to play a super sleuth in Bulldog Drummond Escapes (Paramount, 1937). This lively entry in the film series has Drummond rescuing a lady in distress (Heather Angel) from villains at foggy Greystone Manor. By this time, Milland was really on the ball with his timing, reflexes and use of eyes to where you could practically see what his character was thinking, all marks of a pro.

John Howard took over the role of Drummond later that same year while Milland moved on to other co-starring roles in bigger pictures, including the Technicolor Ebb Tide (Paramount, 1937) as one of the shipwreck survivors stranded on an island ruled by psychotic Lloyd Nolan.

By 1939, Ray had acquired quite a following, including two fan clubs. Soon his wife gave birth to their first child, a son. When the United States entered World War II, Milland tried to enlist in the air force, but was rejected for active service because of restricted use of his left hand, partly the result of an accident with a circular saw a couple years earlier. He did manage to become a civilian contract primary flight instructor for the army.

In Cecil B. DeMille’s colorful tale of lust and lost ships, Reap The Wild Wind (1942), Ray had to don a full deep-sea diving outfit for his fight with a giant squid in the Big Tank at Paramount. The squid, made by prop men at a cost of $2000, had mechanical insides that were operated by electric motors. It could reach out and encircle a man with its eight and twelve-foot tentacles. The night before the scene was to be filmed, Milland had to attend a party where they served only champagne. Not only was he hung over for the morning shoot, but he got thirsty, and the water he drank immediately re-activated the effects of the champagne from the night before!

This and a combination of "cures" from co-star John Wayne and others made for a nightmarish afternoon. DeMille himself never caught on and stated that in all his years in Hollywood and in the theatre he had never seen a finer or more perceptive day’s acting than he had that day!

One of the supporting players in Reap The Wild Wind was played by Hedda Hopper, one of the country’s top gossip columnists whom Milland later described as venomous, vicious, a pathological liar and quite stupid. On one occasion in 1940 she called, and with some colorful expletives threatened to run Ray out of town if he didn’t go on her radio show. He hung up on her. While half of Hollywood may have been scared of Hedda, Ray considered a knock from Hopper practically an accolade, so it did him no harm. Quite the opposite, actually, according to Milland.

A footnote to Reap The Wild Wind; Ray’s character was required to have curly hair. The procedure with hot curling irons may have been what caused Milland to go prematurely bald and necessitate the use of toupees.

The movies got even better, though, and in 1944 Ray starred in that classic haunted house thriller, The Uninvited (Paramount, 1945). The studio had touched on ghost stories before with Supernatural (1933) and The Ghost Breakers (1940), but The Uninvited was the most serious to date, though not without dashes of humor and romance. When Rick Fitzgerald (Milland) and his sister Pamela (Ruth Hussey) purchase a big old house near the cliffs of Cornwall, they get more than they bargained for.

In this tale of complex relationships, the living and the dead are caught up in the battle to determine the fate of a young woman (Gail Russell) whom Rick has fallen in love with. The main ghost is represented by a portrait of actress Elizabeth Russell, who played the evil Countess in the Bela Lugosi Monogram movie The Corpse Vanishes (1942), as well as in producer Val Lewton’s thrillers Cat People (1942), Curse Of The Cat People (1944) and The Seventh Victim (1943). Lewton’s films, to some extent, blazed the trail for such serious minded fare as The Uninvited. For more details on the film, check out the HORROR-WOOD archives.

Milland had already proven himself a capable comedic actor, and his performance in The Uninvited combined the right balance of humor and stability to keep us anchored in reality and see us through the dangers.

The Uninvited and Fritz Lang’s spy thriller Ministry Of Fear that same year and also at Paramount, provided Ray Milland with two impressive showcases of his dramatic abilities and set the stage for probably the highlight of his career the following year in director Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend (Paramount, 1945).

This compelling look at the horrors of alcoholism won Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay and the Best Actor award for Milland, who got the part when Broadway star Jose Ferrer proved unavailable. The film itself provides horrific moments of the believable kind, such as when Milland’s character imagines he sees a mouse stick its head through a hole in the wall and fall prey with a stream of blood to an imaginary bat.

Milland may be the only winner of the Oscar for Best Actor to give no acceptance speech, choosing instead to simply bow and move on. Imagine how much shorter today’s award shows would be if that practice had caught on!

More suspense was in store for Ray in The Big Clock (Paramount, 1947). Magazine magnate Earl Jannoth (Charles Laughton) murders his mistress and assigns ace reporter George Stroud (Milland) to solve the crime! Trouble is the clues all point to George as the killer! Appropriately, it’s a race against time as George must prove his innocence and identify the killer before being spotted himself by a building full of interested parties and the police. The movie’s remake, No Way Out (1987) with Kevin Costner wasn’t bad, either, but it’s just not as much fun as The Big Clock.

Ray Milland had been playing mostly good guys, but he played the Devil himself with Alias Nick Beal (Paramount, 1949). Suave, sinister Beal (Milland) entices a crusading district attorney (Thomas Mitchell) with success, but at the possible price of the lawyer’s soul. While this avenue has been explored before with The Devil And Daniel Webster (1941), the latter film nevertheless effectively blends horror and film noir.

George Macready, who frequently played bad guys, including one of Milland’s villainous adversaries in The Big Clock, this time played the good reverend who tumbles onto Nick Beal’s scheme. Milland would reprise the role of Nick Beal nearly a decade later for an episode of television’s Father Knows Best entitled "Mister Beal Meets His Match."

But first, Ray would get a swing at a nutty professor part in the delightful comedy/sci-fi It Happens Every Spring (Twentieth Century Fox, 1949). He invents a chemical mixture that repels wood, applies the chemical to baseballs, and embarks on a major league pitching career. The movie pre-figured Disney’s "Flubber" pictures by more than a decade.

Milland was back in slick, sophisticated mode for his one picture with Alfred Hitchcock. Dial ‘M’ For Murder (Warner Brothers, 1954) involves a former tennis pro (Milland) who schemes to have his wife (Grace Kelly) done away with. The plan backfires with the hired killer (Anthony Dawson) stuck with a pair of shears in his back, so Milland modifies the plot to frame Grace for the would-be killer’s death.

Originally made in 3-D, Dial ‘M’ For Murder is usually shown flat, but as another entertainment from the Master of Suspense, it’s far from flat.

And Ray Milland’s career was far from over. Ahead were many more movies, including several of his own directorial efforts, along with dozens of television appearances, and his first (but not his last) picture with a young director named Roger Corman. Premature burial, x-ray vision, nuclear devastation, head transplants, killer frogs and much, much more are on tap in part two of our look at the reliable Ray Milland.

Thanks, Joe.  Truly, Ray Milland had more than just a "leading man" type of career in Hollywood...his varied roles prepared him to tackle acting assignments that may have prompted other male leads to seek success in real estate.  Of course, this versatile experience helped him when he entered the "horror zone" of his film career, the second "head" of Milland's body of work...a "zone" we will cover next issue in the second part of this series.

Article copyright © Joe Winters

Return To Archives