The Matinee Idol

When motion pictures began to speak, more than one star of the silent screen, e.g., Corinne Griffith, John Gilbert, turned out to have a boondocks twang or a reedy pitch, and was never heard from again. But to Ronald Colman, whose English accent and pleasingly low register were envied from Metro to Paramount, the coming of sound meant second wind for one of the cinema's longest and most unvaryingly successful careers.

Born in Surrey in 1891, the son of a silk importer, Ronald Colman first headed for an engineering degree at Cambridge, but he had to leave school at 16 when his father died. One of Kitchener's "Old Contemptibles" (the first British soldiers to fight in France) in World War I, he was invalided home with an ankle injury, made his stage debut in 1916. Seeking his fortune in movies after the war, he clicked in Italy, where Henry King took him to be Lillian Gish's leading man in The White Sister. It whisked him to stardom, sent him up the matinee-idol trail (Lady Windermere's Fan, Romola, Stella Dallas) that culminated in Bean Geste. Entering talkies as Bulldog Drummond (1929), Colman soon established the cultured air of weary British dignity that became as crisp and negotiable as a sterling note. His best-known films followed in the late '30s and early '40s--A Tale of Two Cities, Lost Horizon, The Prisoner of Zenda, Random Harvest--but his only Oscar came with A Double Life in 1947. The narrator's role in The Story of Mankind (1957) completed his list of more than 100 film credits.

In recent years Colman led a squirely life in the Santa Barbara hills. With his actress wife Benita Hume he did a radio-and-TV comedy series (The Halls of Ivy), also played host to such career-long friends as Richard Barthelmess and William Powell. It fell to Barthelmess and Powell last week to escort Benita Hume Colman and the Colmans' only child, Juliet, to the funeral of Ronald Colman, dead of a lung infection.

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