Biography
L I F E

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1905 - 1958

"The most graceful actor of our time."
- Charles Laughton on Robert Donat

Remembered for:
The dashing Richard Hannay in Hitchcock's 39 Steps and the Academy Award winning performance of the dedicated teacher in Goodbye, Mr. Chips.

Charles Laughton called him 'the most graceful actor of our time'. Graham Greene said he was 'the best film actor we possess'. Sadly Robert Donat's career was brutally cut short.

Robert Donat had everything an actor could hope for - except clean health. Beneficient spirits attending his cradle endowed him with good looks, a fine voice, height (6ft) exceptional elegance of demeanour. A malevolent spirit gave him chronic asthma.

Born Friedrich Robert Donath in 1905 and of mixed parentage - a Yorkshire mother and a Polish father who came to settle in Manchester - Donat came to the screen in a period when it was very much the poor sister of stage in Britain. It was natural that he should long for the theatre, and indeed he was to become, one of its notable players. He made his stage debut in Birmingham in 1921 and by 1930 had reached the West End. But he was made for the cinema. Alexander Korda recognized Donat's gifts and in 1933 cast him, after a few banal roles, as Thomas Culpeper in The Private Life of Henry VIII. Donat was overshadowed by the bravura of Charles Laughton as the King; but looking back one can see how much his grace and easy charm added to the film. A year later he was in Hollywood playing the lead role in The Count Of Monte Cristo and rags and a beard could not disguise his qualities. In 1929 Donat married Ella Annesley but they were to divorce in 1946.

Back in Britain Donat was Richard Hannay in Alfred Hitchcock's The Thirty Nine Steps (1935), then starred in Rene Clair's comedy The Ghost Goes West (1935) as both the young owner of a scottish castle and his ghost ancestor who is doomed to haunt the castle when it is transported to the USA. Clair was brought over to England by Korda, as was Jacques Feyder, director of Knight Without Armour (1937) - in which Donat played the Englishman faced with the job of getting a widowed countess (Marlene Dietrich) to Moscow after the revolution.

Always Donat was the romantic hero, resourceful, brave, the ideal hero of the Thirties and Forties. Perhaps if health had not handicapped him he might have gone back in triumph to Hollywood and become a truly great star. As it was, illness, increasing diffidence and self doubt, and contractual problems combined to cost him the lead roles in such prestigious films as Captain Blood (1935), Anthony Adverse (1936), and The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). Instead he stayed to work in Britain and there had a brief period of glittering fame in the late Thirties.

He had not been happy in Hollywood in any case, but he had made an impression, and when MGM broadened their empire to include production in Britain they made him one of their leading players. King Vidor directed him in The Citadel (1938) and drew from him a performance of consideable range as a doctor who moves from Wales to fashionable England.

In 1939 came the film with which the name of Robert Donat has been linked with ever since: Sam Wood's Goodbye Mr Chips. Insisting on the role, he audaciously broke away from the smmoth, confident face; the easy elegant movements of the ideal film star. He played a master at an English pulic school, at first helplessly ragged by the pupils, then taught self-assurance by his beautiful wife (Greer Garson), desolate as a widower and finally a whiskery old sentimentalist. It was a character of fantasy, but still solid enough for Donat to pull off a superb performance and win a Best Actor Oscar. Decades after, Donat's Chips is still remembered, putting all other performances of the part, including Martin Clunes' recent turn, to shame.

He never did as well again. Turned down for military service, he gave a decent but uninspired performance in the flagwaving The Young Mr Pitt (1942); and returned to action in Adventures of Tartu (1943), a piece of flummery in which he played a wartime British sabotage agent. It was not worthy of his powers. But increasingly Donat was engaged in the fight against illness. He was unremarkable as the husband who resumes marriage with Deborah Kerr after war-enforced separation in Perfect Strangers (1945) - both his and Korda's last film for MGM - but more commanding as the defence counsel in The Winslow Boy (1948). In 1949 he produced, adapted (from Walter Greenwood's play) directed and starred in a pleasant but tame Northern comedy The Cure for Love for Korda. Donat played a soldier pursued by a coarse, overbearing fiancee (Dora Bryan) and a sweeter girl (Renee Asherson) who wins him in the end; in 1953 Donat married Miss Asherson in real life and though they separated in 1956 they were due to be reconciled at the time of his untimely death.

He was touching as the film pioneer Freise-Green in the Festival of Britain picture, The Magic Box (1951) but, by now very ill, had to refuse roles in No Highway (1951) and Hobson's Choice (1954). Oxygen cylinders were kept in the wings for him when he acted in T.S.Eliot's play Murder in The Cathedral in 1953 and there was mordant irony in his casting as the dying country parson in Lease of Life (1954). In 1958 he summoned up the last of his strength to play the mandarin in The Inn of the Sixth Happiness. A Month later he was dead.

Donat could have been one of the universal stars of cinema. Illness, however, corroded the later years of his comparatively brief life. It could not destroy his brilliant gifts but it shortened his career, and one might say, blunted it.