Five Favourite Actors

My very strong OCD tendencies mean that I've long been inclined to cultivate and maintain all manner of charts and tables in an effort to make sense of the fundamentally illogical. On that basis then, I present to you a list of my ten favourite actors - embroidered with unstructured personal diatribes, but a list nonetheless! - grouped with what I believe to constitute their three canonical performances. Still to come is a sequel in which I talk up the virtues of the remaining five candidates. Well... try to have a little fun with it. Matters will run altogether more smoothly if you're on affable terms with classic horror films. If not though, now is the perfect opportunity to become so! In any case, I hope that my ruminations will provide you with the requisite get-up-and-go to persuade you to seek out the work of some of these wonderful performers. And, hey - it might even reveal why my acting style is as screwed up as it is!

1. TOD SLAUGHTER (1885 - 1956)

Squire William Corder, Maria Marten, or The Murder in the Red Barn (1935)
Sweeney Todd, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1936)
The False Percival Glyde, Crimes at the Dark House (1940)

My passion for Slaughter was written in the stars. For years I'd read about the eminent lunacy of the man's performances, yet remained unable to track down any of his maddeningly obscure films. For those unfamiliar with the Slaughter legend, I present a simple image. Picture a man in black. A beaver-fur top hat and a full-length opera cape are his humble accessories. Now - picture this figure moved to maniacal animation, and engaged in the serious business of shackling a screaming heroine to the railroad tracks. Infernal, grating cackling seems to ignite the air. And the moustache. Pointed - lascivious - impeccably waxed; the horns of the devil transposed to a cringing upper lip... Tod Slaughter is, quite simply, the living embodiment of melodrama. In Crimes at the Dark House, a very loose adaptation of The Woman in White and by far the most cinematic of Slaughter's films, Slaughter does indeed get down to the serious business of twirling his moustache in fiendish glee. Seminal stuff. Incidentally, this tradition seems to have emerged with the loathsome Rigaud in Little Dorrit by (who else?) Charles Dickens - which makes it a perfect addition to the work of his close friend and contemporary Wilkie Collins! Slaughter's performances are an all-too-rare rare artefact of a way of acting long since dead. It's an oft-repeated truism that Slaughter's pictures demonstrate what Victorian filmmaking might have looked like. All of the man's performances contain at least one elusive, unforgettable moment that brands itself upon the memory by its absolute strangeness. In Maria Marten, it's the truly alarming way that his voice crackles and warps when gazing down on the exhumed body of his peasant lover, exclaiming of her murder that 'But you forced me to! You forced me to!' As Sweeney Todd, Slaughter's signature role, it's the bizarre curl of the fingers as he hisses 'Come here, Tobias...!' - which miraculously conjures up every awful, skin-crawling stereotype of paedophilia imaginable. Crimes at the Dark House came late enough in Slaughter's screen career that it's a (comparatively) restrained performance, but he still manages to deliver the immortal line 'I'll feed your entrails to the pigs!' with what seems a disarming level of conviction. Slaughter's performances are deranged, maniacal, barnstorming ham in the very best sense of the word. As an actor, he is strangely impressive for it - and always hugely entertaining. The history books have played no small part in perpetuating the lie that Slaughter was a deluded hack. There is no way that anyone possessed of even half a brain-cell could vault so consistently over-the-top across such a long career without being aware of what a grand joke the whole business was. Demand-and-supply is the name of the game: the public appetite for melodrama has always been unquenchable - even if it is stifled and filtered through the medium of the television soap nowadays. The Face at the Window (a gaslit Parisian werewolf mystery that must be seen to be believed) even opens with a prologue that ensures its audience is as thoroughly prepared for chuckles as chills. For me at least, Tod Slaughter is also a man whose career is an inspiring example. Slaughter is an enduring relic of the real provincial actor. Quite incapable of cut-glass, upper-class polish, Slaughter is rough and raw in his performance style, but with quite enough enthusiasm to carry him through. It's a real shame that Slaughter's stage production of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was never filmed... but in complete honesty, it's hard to imagine him playing anyone but Hyde! Slaughter's films have now passed into the public domain, which means that most of them are available to watch online. If ever have the time to spare, you can count on a very interesting hour...

2. GEORGE ZUCCO (1886 - 1960)

Professor Moriarty, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939)
Dr. Lloyd Clayton / Dr. Elwyn Clayton, Dead Men Walk (1943)
Richard Stanley, Sherlock Holmes in Washington (1943)

The appeal of George Zucco is instant - and magnetic. Zucco had - or at least gave the impression of having - one of the most extraoridnary natural instruments of any actor in history. His composure was ever that of the polite English gentleman; his voice the purr of a satanically inspired cat; his eyeballs ever glowing like possessed moons, crystal balls primed to summon up the spirits of the dead... It seems that Zucco could do most anything and endow it with an absolute fascination and integrity. Predictably, the man was a theatrical heavyweight. For a number of years, he was an acting teacher at RADA... I'm sure that the employment qualifications were far less standardised than they are today, and that can mean only one thing - the man was an outstanding actor at the very top of his game. A glance at the man's stage experience only confirms the suspicion. Zucco created the role of Osbourne in the original production of Journey's End - which co-starred a very young Laurence Olivier as Stanhope. Yet by all accounts, it was Zucco who got the most thunderous applause of the evening. Olivier's replacement in the part, the woefully underrated Colin Clive, transformed the production into a prescient celebration of cinemacabre. Clive and director James Whale were fated to collaborate on the movie masterpieces Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, with Zucco turning up for an inglorious strangulation in the later series potboiler House of Frankenstein. Zucco also gained worldwide acclaim for playing Disraeli in the now-forgotten smash-hit Victoria Regina (which featured Vincent Price, a great Zucco-booster, as Prince Albert). Yet in Hollywood, a very different career beckoned. George Zucco fast became the master of the bit part, the cameo, the walk-on role. It's heartening to reflect on just how often he stopped the show. The Hunchback of Notre Dame is a fine example of this phenomenon, with Zucco turning up in monk-like raiments for roughly five seconds to dispense proclamations of doom - but then, so is The Black Swan, in which Zucco's magisterial progress down a monolothic stone staircase upstages the attention-seeking antics of the outrageous Laird Cregar and the annoyingly pretty Tyrone Power. As with all such bit-players, Zucco appeared in a great deal of junk. Dead Men Walk was among the first films in in which I was consciously aware of Zucco as an actor. It's also one of the worst films I've seen - perhaps a surprise to those who think I dismiss only films veneered in colour, widescreen and pseudo-philosophical pretension (Inception springs to mind). Zucco just about carries it, playing the insane dual role of a benevolent doctor and his vampiric brother, but he's fighting a losing battle. For a very long time actually, Zucco's Scared to Death truly was the worst film that I'd seen... His turns in Basil Rathbone's Holmes series are much more fun, delivering not only a definitive Moriarty in the finest installment of the series, but another fun turn as the proprietor of an antique shop equipped with such choice items as a knife-projecting casket deployed to decapitate world-famous detectives. And always with such dignity... He surely knew what trash he was making - quite a fall-off from the glory days of Journey's End - but the absolute class with which he did it has endeared him to a new generation of audiences. It is the dreck that endures, sadly enough, and it is fortunate for Zucco's continued reputation that he always gave his all. And, lest it be forgotten, his favourite author was Dickens. Now that's got to count for something!

3. BORIS KARLOFF (1887 - 1969)

Ardath Bey, The Mummy (1932)
The Monster, Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
Byron Orlock, Targets (1968)

Karloff is a man so famous that he requires little introduction. A man so famous that he was once referred to on cinema marquees by surname alone, a feat rivalled only by the glitzy MGM starpower of Garbo. Karloff's great bequest to acting was the niche he carved for the macabre as a separate dramatic area. Horror, mystery and melodrama - all dragged shrieking from the Grand Guignol and flung smack-bang into the heart of modern pop culture. True, Bela Lugosi got the ball rolling with Dracula a little earlier in 1931, but Karloff was the man who carried the torch so triumphantly and set it forever blazing in the cinematic firmament. In addition to his unparalleled box office fire, Karloff managed to court the terror business a strange amount of respectability, and even, at times, a sort of gentility - something that certainly hasn't endured into this modern age of hockey masks, torture porn and human centipedes. But in spite of Karloff's fame and success (a celebrity you felt you knew if ever there was one), a certain feeling of mystery clings to Karloff the man. Frankenstein made Karloff a star in 1931. By that time he was aged forty-four - strikingly old in a period where the careers of leading ladies were summarily terminated in their late twenties. Great chunks of his life are lost to history. He was born to the upper classes - yet was almost certainly illegitimate. He deserted a promising education for decades of unsuccessful work in the repertory system. He was married at least six times, although recent evidence might well bump this figure up to seven. He was dedicated to trade unions and sought reform at a time when blacklisting was a very grave peril. He was identified as (raise eyebrows here) 'Hollywood's greatest swordsman' by a gaggle of prostitutes arrested on a Californian roadside. He owned a pet pig named Violet. This depth is what survives in Karloff's work on film. Whatever far-flung psychological resonances that murky past contained, it haunts his performances with an unsettling aura of the 'other' - perhaps unsurprisingly, 'the Uncanny' were the words that most often followed his monolithic surname on theatre marquees. Nowhere is this displayed to greater advantage than in The Mummy, in which Karloff sets the screen ablaze with his grandiose, crumbling presence. His co-star, Zita Johann, later recalled the indescribable sadness of Karloff, his eyes appearing to her as 'shattered mirrors'. It's a worn old cliche, but it seems fitting to say that experience is what made Karloff so great as an actor. And such a wealth of sterling performances... Frankenstein is naturally seminal, so much so that it is easy to overlook - to the extent that I found myself not liking it that much the first time round. That's a shameful thing for a horror nut like myself to admit to, so I'll elucidate a little. Lugosi's Dracula, Frankenstein's natural bookend, is a film so universally derided that I wound up enjoying its paltry, dusty merits to the direct exclusion of its (many) defects. Frankenstein, being the masterpiece that it is, draws little attention to its brilliance. It sets out its virtues in a disarmingly primitive, unfussy manner, perhaps only half-aware that what it contains is riding on the crest of a new wave, and is, in fact, history-making. 'Why such fuss over Karloff?' I wondered. 'He's not really doing anything. Everyone knows that that's the way the Monster's meant to act...' Little heed did I pay to the fact that Karloff was creating the time-tested stereotypes as he went along. It's a truly majestic performance, and only improved on by the addition of speech and screentime in the follow-up, Bride of Frankenstein. My pre-teen rashness has come full circle now, and today Karloff reigns as my favourite actor of all time. The Body Snatcher is often acclaimed as Karloff's greatest performance, and it is certainly grand, more than deserving of an Oscar nomination, though not perfect. It's perhaps a little too full of what his daughter, Sara Karloff, refers to as her father's sing-song acting voice... Better to my mind is Targets, which came when Karloff had had time to really relax into his persona - and play it out to its natural conclusion, playing the part of an aging horror star who shuns his domesticated terrors for those of the real world. The Walking Dead is a much earlier work (a gangster-horror hybrid from the Warner lot), and too often forgotten. It's heart-wrenching in the extreme, and well worth a viewing.

4. CLAUDE RAINS (1889 - 1967)

Jack Griffin, The Invisible Man (1933)
Erique Claudin, Phantom of the Opera (1943)
Job Skeffington, Mr. Skeffington (1944)

It's only now that it strikes me, but my passion for Rains is very similar to my passion for Zucco, so far as both men project the impression of a stunning, fascinating, but entirely natural presence. It is the voice beyond all that triumphs in Rains, an especially useful gift for an actor who made his name by playing The Invisible One. Nor is it a surprise to discover that Rains, as an acting teacher at RADA (another Zucco crossover), became the hero and mentor of John Gielgud, whose own delivery (as beautiful as it could be) was so fantastically constrained and mannered that Rains can be tentatively labelled its naturalistic original. An earnest effort to describe Rains's vocal capabilities quickly descends into hyperbole, so I won't tire you with an excess of cheery remarks about the great quantity of phone-related books I'd pay good money to hear him read unabridged. Like so much in theatre, nothing is quite what it seems. Rains worked on his voice with an arduous, driven commitment that is both admirable and rather scary. Claude's daughter, Jessica Rains, has vivid recollections of her father slipping into his natural, cockney accent when she was a child - and being unable to understand a single word of it! It's curious that the actors I admire most deeply are not those who plays naturalistically, nor even those who paste character on top of themselves as though with a trowel to cultivate audience interest. It is those who seem to have been fantastically fascinating humans - whether by accident or rigidly enforced, intensely focused design - that have been emblazoned on my memory. For all this though, it was that most brazenly theatrical of turns in The Invisible Man that first endeared Rains to me. As far as I'm concerned, it's one of the greatest films ever made, and this is due in no small part to Rains's barnstorming performance. The script, penned by playwright R. C. Sherriff (and yes, I am aware that this blog is operating on an increasingly narrow continuum of Journey's End, long-dead RADA teachers and old horror films...), jousts with the likes of All About Eve for the pithiest of filmic writing, and Rains delivers his every line to fiendish, staccato perfection. A particular favourite of mine is his hilariously relaxed speech on world domination, delivered in a languid, swooning posture from a gently swaying rocking chair: 'We'll begin with a reign of terror, a few murders here and there, murders of great men, murders of little men, just to show we make no distinction... We might even wreck a train or two. Just these hands - around a signalman's throat - that's all!' This is an atypical turn for Rains. His conventional screen presence was a great deal more polite and reserved. He always reminds me of Ian Holm in his manner and appearance. Holm has advanced an outstanding observation on acting that might just as easily apply to the effortless naturalism of Claude Rains: "I've always been a minimalist. It was Bogart who once said, 'If you think the right thoughts, the camera will pick it up". The most important thing in the face is the eyes, and if you can make the eyes talk, you're halfway there.' The same can be said for Rains, whose own quasi-mystical approach to acting was nonetheless deeply rooted in the undervalued virtue of simplicity: 'I learn the lines and pray to God'. Perhaps this gets to the root of my bugbear with naturalism. It is absolutely to be encouraged - provided you are a fascinating human being to start with. Rains possessed this quality, and he was capable of the most touching and pure things onscreen. I've harped on about the strengths of his Phantom of the Opera in an earlier entry, so I won't repeat myself here, but Mr. Skeffington has made it into my selection for much the same reason. Watch the scene where he goes to lunch with his infant daughter without crying. I dare ya! The Adventures of Robin Hood, Casablanca and Hitchcock's Notorious are his mainstream hits, and all are worth seeking out.

5. HENRY DANIELL (1894 - 1963)

Henry Brocklehurst, Jane Eyre (1943)
Doctor MacFarlane, The Body Snatcher (1945)
Doctor Moriarty, The Woman in Green (1945)

If I was to sum up Henry Daniell in a soundbite, it might well be 'the Alan Rickman of the early twentieth century'. Daniell was quite brilliant in every respect, and another proof of how little variety there is in my choice of favourite actors. His Moriarty is a particularly interesting creation, and a neat way into Daniell's wider approach to acting. This is a performance containing none of the jovial, good-natured hamminess of his series rivals, George Zucco and Lionel Atwill. Daniell suggests a vain, pampered reptile - strangely stiffened, as though stricken with arthiritis, with unreadable dead eyes. Impeccable coldness is the general impression. I certainly didn't care for Daniell the first time round, and while I still place his Moriarty a peg below Zucco's merry turn (and perhaps Eric Porter's perfectly monstrous characterisation in the Jeremy Brett TV series), it's a performance I've come to appreciate on its own silky, seductive merits. It's not a warm or appealing turn at all, but then, that's exactly the point - the very idea that Moriarty should court charisma is an invention of Hollywood, and Daniell gives a performance that serves the script and story indelibly well. The Woman in Green is among the darkest of Holmes mysteries, with Moriarty dispatching his henchmen to murder and sever the fingers of London citizens. Daniell never seeks to upstage his material, and for that alone he deserves respect - the mark of the really good character actor. It's also worth nothing that Daniell was Basil Rathbone's personal favourite of all of his series adversaries, a choice that has often surprised its followers, but might make a bit more sense with this rationale. Now The Body Snatcher is a completely different kettle of fish. In my estimation, it's one of the most underrated performances in film history. And yes, without a doubt, Oscar worthy. Typecasting was at once the most life-affirming yet soul-crushing force in old Hollywood. Whilst it assured many actors a comfortable living and a restricted immortality as archetypal forces indicative of so many different things (Western gunslinger; tough old bird; crazed gold-digger; English butler; gypsy peasant, ad nauseum), it tended to fundamentally limit screentime as performers slipped ever further into 'character' status. Without The Body Snatcher to his credit, Daniell may have gone the way of someone like Frederic Worlock, delivering a series of memorably insane performances in thirty-second chunks, but never showing much in the way of range or (dare I say it?) humanity. The Body Snatcher must be seen to be believed. It's a stunner, and so many details in Daniell's Doctor MacFarlane have returned to me through the years that it unnerves me a little. At the moment, it's his outburst in the surgery when faced with a disabled girl, congealing ambition and frustration and that unremitting, pitch-black coldness when he lets rip with (at lightning speed) 'confound it, the child's a cripple, of course she wants to walk!' This same cruelty was greatly in evidence in his Brocklehurst in Jane Eyre. The white, searing hatred that Charlotte Bronte instils in the reader for the fanatical schoolmaster is one of the greatest things that any writer can hope to achieve, and Daniell absolutely nails it in his performance, at his best when telling young Jane of the delightful tortures of hell. But what Daniell creates in MacFarlane is his lasting legacy. It may be Fredric March for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Anthony Hopkins for The Silence of the Lambs that walked off with the horror genre's only Best Actor Oscars, but, for my money, Daniell delivers a greater performance than either of them, one of the four or five most riveting bits of acting I've seen in my life. Why so many people harp on about Karloff in The Body Snatcher, I'll never know. Daniell owns its every frame. And, as a sidebar, might I add just how deeply unsettling it was to be interviewed by the English Faculty's own Doctor MacFarlane when I applied to this mad institution we call Cambridge, the ghost of Henry Daniell still ringing in my head as I tried desperately to concoct more lies about W. B. Yeats... At some point, I explained my concerns to the undergraduate so efficiently marshalling me from place to place. She didn't get the reference. Such moments in life are to be treasured.