Diffident actor made life more difficult for himself

Mason died of a heart attack at the age of 75 in summer 1984, and the following year Morley embarked on a three-year period of research and writing in England, Switzerland, the United States, Canada and Australia. Some 80 people answered what he says were his innumerable and sometimes impertinent questions, on tape or phone, in letters or interviews, or with extracts from their own writing whether published or private. That all sounds promising.

What emerged takes us toward an understanding of an often confused man. For instance: “He hardly ever gave the impression that he had wanted or intended to be an actor in the first place. It merely became and remained his lifetime’s work, one that he did to the very best of his abilities despite the fact that all his early ambitions had been for architecture.”

Similarly, “James never really understood quite how he’d got there, and was never entirely certain that it was his intended destination”. Another opinion was that Mason’s greatest asset was his voice and his greatest drawback was a habit of coming on stage looking as though he might be found out and sent back to some entirely different career. According to the book, in early films too he seemed to be vaguely ashamed to be caught acting for a living.

Other factors also defined Mason’s life. It’s Morley’s belief that the man went to his grave still uncertain whether his conscientious objection to World War Two in 1939 had been an act of considerable isolationist courage or the appalling blunder of a coward. It split his family.

Also the actor had, in his own view and by his own admission, “fucked up” his career by emigrating to the United States in 1949 at the height of his British fame, and by continuing over there a futile battle against the big studios for control over his own films and his own career, a control that he had learned in England could never be enjoyed by “a mere actor”.

James Neville Mason was born in Huddersfield in the West Riding of Yorkshire, on May 15, 1909, the youngest of three sons of a reasonably affluent textile merchant. Acting does not seem to have formed any part of his school life but he developed a vague interest in West End of London theatre because his grandfather sent him Play Pictorial magazine each month. Mason, interested in photography himself, liked its attractive pictures of plays and actors.

At Cambridge University a friend introduced him into the world of college dramatics. “It was partly this prominence, the fact of showing off on stage, that gratified my vanity,” Mason acknowledged later. Coming down from Cambridge aged 22 in 1931 he did not want to ask his father for further subsidies to continue studies to be an architect, so decided to act.

Looking for openings, he made his professional debut in “The Rascal” at the Theatre Royal, Aldershot, on November 23 that year. This was followed by touring productions, resident seasons and repertory, often dispiriting in dull English provinces and seaside towns. A step up was performing for the Old Vic theatre at Waterloo and short stints in the West End of London. It was at the former that film producer Alexander Korda saw him and took note.

Korda gave him a week’s work on “The Return of Don Juan” in 1934 (now known as “The Private Life of Don Juan” ), then cut it to three days, then sacked him altogether, gently suggesting to Mason that perhaps a mistake had been made about his casting. It was, writes Morley, not an auspicious opening for one of the most distinguished acting careers in the history of the cinema, and Mason rapidly returned to the theatre from whence he had come.

Nonetheless, he overcame the humiliation, and in 1935 made his screen debut in “Late Extra”, then a rapid succession of “quota quickies”. These were “B” pictures churned out at about two a month for the lower half of double features, and by the end of 1936 his career was in bad shape. As a professional for five years he had done little of note on stage except some promising work at the Old Vic and Dublin’s Gate Theatre, and seven mostly bad films.

He stuck it out, overcoming the temptation of architecture, and drifting around in a haze of minor films and short-lived plays, until as a “non-combatant” in the last four years of the war he made no less than a dozen pictures all with considerable improvement in budgets and ambition from the quickies of his immediate past. It rescued him from the doldrums.

Mason broke his rule of a lifetime and signed a five-picture deal with Britain’s Rank Organisation, instantly regretting it. Consequently, he played “The Man in Grey” (1943) in a state of fury, hating the part, the script, the film and still more the prospect of another four like it, a swashbuckler that he could never bring himself to watch. But after 19 pictures and 13 years as an actor it made him an international film star at the age of 35.

Morley writes that a large part of Mason’s career frustration stemmed  from a desire, only semi-articulated, to have more control over his artistic destiny than he would ever achieve. The public wanted Mason as a villain horsewhipping fellow star Margaret Lockwood, preferably in period costume, rather than displaying his considerable versatility.

He saw himself in danger of becoming the Home Counties’ answer to Eric von Stroheim (ha ha – good line) torn between a desire to make a decent living and be allowed to make films that were not far beneath his own intelligence. It was a fight he fought and lost all his career.

He literally wrote a death warrant to his English career with some bitter articles for movie magazines about the sheer awfulness of being an English leading man and the utter futility of the small-minded, parochial and bureaucratic British film industry, especially Rank.

Morley writes: “In departing for America towards the end of 1946, at precisely the moment when his British career was at a commercial and critical height which it would never recapture, there is no doubt that Mason did himself professional damage from which he took years, if not decades, to recover.”

His 15 years of self-imposed exile in the US often went badly too, with a lawsuit, a divorce that wiped him out financially, a reluctance to fit into the English acting community in Hollywood, and susceptibility to many of the same professional problems he felt he had encountered in England. He conceded he should never have left at the height of popularity.

Morley interviewed him for magazines, newspapers, radio and television over the last decade of his life, and Mason told him: “ I brought a lot of bad publicity on myself over the years. When I settled in the United States, London papers attacked me as if I’d insulted England, and when I came back they could hardly wait to call me a failure. A lot of that was unfair and it did me make me irascible, so one way and another I wasted a lot of time.”

Living in Switzerland, he would often accept bad scripts just for the money. He settled into the peripatetic life of a strolling player, finding a bleak humour in the worst of the work and a vague satisfaction when a script came along that satisfied him. He made many turkeys but also the late glories of “The Verdict” (1982) and “The Shooting Party” (1985).

Here at The Budapest Times, whenever we watch a James Mason film – and we’ve seen quite a few of the main ones – we tend to simply take it as it is for the 90-minute ride. In our plebeian way, we just enjoy ’em or we don’t enjoy ’em so much. Sheridan Morley fills out the back picture nicely. James Neville Mason – an odd man out of time and place indeed.