Background
Milland, Ray was born on January 3, 1907 in Neath, Wales.
Milland, Ray was born on January 3, 1907 in Neath, Wales.
He attended King's College School in Cardiff.
He had begun in Britain. After King’s College, London, and service in the Guards, he drifted into movies apparently while visiting a girlfriend actress at the studios. As Spike Milland, he had a small part in The Plaything (29, Castleton Knight). Smoothed out into Raymond Milland. he made several more British pictures, including The Flying Scotsman (29, Knight) and Lady from the Sea (29, Knight), before going to Hollvwood to appear at Metro, opposite Marion Davies, in The Bachelor Father (31, Robert Z. Leonard). He stayed a year in America, in several films, the best of which was Payment Deferred (32, Lothar Mendes).
Returning to Britain, he was in Orders Is Orders (33, Walter Forde) before going back to Paramount, to small parts in Bolero (34, Wesley Ruggles) and We’re Not Dressing (34, Norman Taurog), and thence to a contract. For the next ten years, Milland worked hard in a variety of supporting roles and romantic leads at Paramount and on loan: Many Happy Returns (34, Norman Z. McLeod); Four Hours to Kill (35, Mitchell Leisen); The Glass Key (35, Frank Tuttle); The Gilded Lily (35, Ruggles) with Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray; at Universal with Deanna
Durbin in Three Smart Girls (36, Henry Koster); in Mitchell Leisen’s Easy Living (37), Arise My Love (40), I Wanted Wings (41), and Lady in the Dark (44); for Wellman in Men With Wings (38) and Beau Geste (39); Hotel Imperial (39, Robert Florey); a great success back in Britain in Asquith’s French Without Tears (39); in De Milles Reap the Wild Wind (42), and otherwise the model squire to Paulette Goddard, Loretta Young, and Dorothy Lamour. Then in 1942 he played with Ginger Rogers in Billy Wilders first film. The Major and the Minor.
After his first hint of vulnerability as the man freed from an asylum and plunged into intrigue in Fritz Lang’s The Ministry of Fear (44), Till We Meet Again (44, Frank Borzage), and The Uninvited (44, Lewis Allen), Wilder cast Milland as the drunk in The Lost Weekend (45). That Oscar- winning performance is far too self-destructive, too dreamily trapped in the dire romance of booze, to be saved by the happy ending appended to the film. Milland suddenly revealed himself as an actor capable of showing all the flaws in attractiveness. But that promise was not taken up by his employer, largely because the bleakness of Lost Weekend was so far ahead of its time.
Milland was able to exploit the decline in his romantic appeal by pursuing more interesting parts in less successful films: thus Kitty (45) and Golden Earrings (47) for Leisen were throwbacks; but California (46), The Big Clock (48), Alias Nick Beal (49), and Copper Canyon (50), all for John Farrow, extended his range. In 1948, he returned to Britain to act in So Evil, My Love (Allen), and again in 1951 when he acted in and produced facques Tourneurs dismal Circle of Danger. In America, his contract with Paramount was running out. After A Life of Her Own (50, George Cukor), he made two more films that tried to renew the theme of alcoholism: Night into Morning (51, Fletcher Markle) and George Stevens's Something to Live For (52), with Joan Fontaine, before Run (53. Lewis R. Foster), his last Paramount contract film.
He now embarked on a series of offbeat films. In 1952, he had appeared in Russell Rouses The Thief an interesting thriller with verv little dialogue. In 1954, he played a charming conspirer toward Grace Kellys death in Dial M for Murder, scathingly attuned to Hitchcocks black comedy; he also directed his own Western, A Man Alone. The next year he had the right rich man’s languor as Stanford White in Fleischer’s The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing. After that, he directed Lisbon (56), the brilliant The Safecracker (58), Panic in Year Zero (62), and less notably Hostile Witness (68). He also acted in Three Brave Men (57, Philip Dunne), The River's Edge (57, Allan Dwran). and in two Roger Gorman films: The Premature Burial (61) and The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (63).
It was sad that this low-budget excellence should pass unnoticed and that the world should rediscover him as the father in the sickly Love Story (70, Arthur Hiller). However, he seemed conscious of that inadequate offering for new audiences and once more demonstrated his range and enterprise: acting in Company oj Killers (70, Jerry Thorpe); Embassy (72, Gordon Messier); renewing his taste for science fiction, in the remarkable Frogs (72, George McCowan); with Frankie Howerd in The House in Nightmare Park (73, Peter Sykes); Terror in the Wax Museum (73, George Fenady); Gold (74, Peter Hunt); The Swiss Conspiracy (75, Jack Arnold); Aces High (76, Jack Gold); The Last Tycoon (76, Elia Kazan); Mayday at 40,000 Feet! (76, Robert Butler); and Oliver's Story (78, John L. Korty).
In his last years, he was to be seen in many different kinds of rubbish, his aplomb still plummy: Battlestar Galactica (79, Richard A. Golla); The Darker Side of Terror (79, Gus Trikonis); Game for Vultures (79, James Fargo); The Attic (79, George Edwards); The Dream Merchants (80, Vincent Sherman); Survival Run (80, Larry Spiegel); Our Family Business (81, Robert Collins), playing a Mafia boss; The Royal Romance of Charles and Diana (82, Peter Levin); Staiflight: the Plane That Couldn’t Land (83, Jerry Jameson); Cave-in! (83, Fenady); Sherlock Holmes and the Masks of Death (84, Roy Ward Baker); and The Sea Serpent (86, Gregory Greens).
Milland had little trouble playing American as a young man. He wore clothes like an officer, and he was good-looking in a glossy way. He smiled to order, and partnered a lot of actresses with aplomb. But there was something else in the man, something more autocratic or less good-natured, and it was promise of the saturnine figure from Dial M for Murder and the man who, at fifty, would make films of his own that were stark and forbidding.
Married Malvina Webber, 1932. 2 children (1 adopted).