Claude Rains: An Actor’s Voice (review)

With Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen (1990), The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror (1993), Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning, Hollywood’s Master of the Macabre (1995) and Screams of Reason: Mad Science and Modern Culture (1997), David J. Skal established himself as the leading popular historian of classical Hollywood horror. However, his new biography is only tangentially related to this specialism because Claude Rains’s horror and sf performances constitute a mere fraction of his stage and screen roles; and despite the imprimatur of an academic press, the reader anticipating even the level of critical engagement found in Skal’s earlier books will be disappointed.

In some respects, this is not Skal’s fault. The involvement of Rains’s only daughter, Jessica, lends the book the aura of an authorised biography. This is compounded both by Skal’s own hagiographic tendencies, and by his dependence on a particular – although admittedly major – primary source. In the mid-1960s, after a couple of failed attempts at an autobiography, Rains recorded 30 hours of interviews with journalist Jonathan Root for a proposed biography. That project folded with Root’s sudden death, and the tapes were later purchased by Rains’s estate (they are now held at Boston University’s Claude Rains Collection). Although Skal presents them as authoritative, citing Rains’s ‘near-photographic memory’, which ‘enabled him to vividly recall a multitude of conversations and encounters from his early childhood onward’ (261), a certain scepticism does occasionally sneak through: ‘Although Rains’s recollections may seem, as presented, so detailed as to suggest some degree of fictionalization, in fact the interviews have been only lightly edited for clarity and grammar’ (261).

Skal rakes little in the way of muck, and his rather sanitised Rains denies the reader any real insight into this quiet and private man. Reading between the lines, one can find vague hints that six-times-married Rains, the son of a physically abusive father, might have been an abusive husband (especially in his later years, when his alcoholism can be deployed as mitigation). In recounting the divorces, Skal focuses on the perfidy of faithless wives while downplaying Rains’s own extra-marital entanglements, several times returning to Rains’s heroic defence of his own virtue from Bette Davis’s attentions. Passages about various gay friends and associates – Noel Coward, Charles Laughton, Rock Hudson – seem haunted by the need to assert Rains’s heterosexuality.

For those interested in Rains’s performance style, the details of his British theatrical background – he was discovered (or perhaps created) by the last of the great Victorian actor-managers, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree – offer incidental insights into the careful restraint he learned to exercise on-screen. Rains’s denigration of Cary Grant as knowing ‘nothing about acting’ (92) when they worked on The Last Outpost (Barton and Gasnier US 1935) is unsurprising. Both actors came from physical theatrical backgrounds, albeit of very different kinds, but they found different solutions to the restraint required by screen acting – a contrast best observed in Notorious (Hitchcock US 1946), in which both rely on physical constraint and gestural economy, the mellifluous Rains to perform ease and Grant to express repressed desire and rage.

The reader interested in the production histories of specific films will find few of them receiving more than a cursory paragraph. Although The Invisible Man (Whale US 1933) gets maybe ten pages, they are mostly devoted to problems with the screenplay (on which John Huston and Preston Sturges, among many others, worked) and accounts of make-up and special effects. Skal provides no real insights into the experience of working in the studio system, beyond Warner Bros’ repeated failure to meet the conditions of Rains’s contract and their as-frequent efforts to renegotiate it.

Instead, Skal offers a thoroughly readable if rather slight account – over a third of the book’s pages are endmatter – of Rains’s...