Knight Without Armour: Robert Donat
Like all the best movie stars, Robert Donat always seemed like he had a secret of some kind, yet he often underplayed and also gave the impression that he wasn’t really trying to hide anything from us. His sensitive face could look amused or disgusted very easily, and he had a rare kind of gentleness on screen mixed with a kind of gruff authority that made him swoon-worthy for many 1930s audiences. Donat had an unusually expressive voice that could shoot up as high as possible (listen to how high his voice is when he sweetly says the word, “Spit!” in The Citadel {1938}) or get insinuatingly low, as when he says, “I’m going to kiss you again,” to Elissa Landi in The Count of Monte Cristo (1934).
Judy Garland wanted to sing “You Made Me Love You” in the movie Broadway Melody of 1938 to a photograph of Donat, but she was convinced to sing it to Clark Gable instead. Donat was briefly thought of as a sort of British Gable in the ‘30s (he even wore a mustache sometimes), and he prevailed over The King in the Oscar race of 1939, winning the award for Best Actor in Goodbye Mr. Chips over both Gable in Gone with the Wind and James Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Hollywood was always trying to woo him with contracts and awards, but Donat didn’t like working there. The Count of Monte Cristo was the only film he made in California, and it was the movie that Garland had so loved when she saw him in it. Donat stayed mainly in his native England, working with producer Alexander Korda and then under an MGM contract that let the studio distribute his British-made films.
Donat was born Friedrich Robert Donat in 1905 in Manchester, the youngest of four sons. As a boy he had a stammer, so his parents sent him to a speech teacher, James Bernard, who helped him to overcome his stuttering and also got rid of his Manchester accent. He worked as Bernard’s secretary and started to act on stage at the age of sixteen, playing Lucius in Julius Caesar in Henry Baynton’s company. Donat played for four years in the company of Sir Frank Benson and supplemented this with seasons in rep, where he met a young actress, Ella Annesley Voysey, proposed, and married her in 1929.
He struggled to get parts for a bit, and it was at this time that he had his first serious asthma attack. Donat himself and one of his later biographers felt that these attacks were partly psychosomatic, but you have only to look at his drawn, suffering face in some of his later films to see that it was a real affliction, something to be coped with, something to overcome. The severity of his asthma limited his career, finally, but it also gave him something to work against. When he fights in his movies, as he often does, often giving long speeches in courtrooms, it seems to affect Donat physically as well as emotionally. Fighting depletes him, but he has to stand up for himself and for what he believes in, and if this means his health will suffer, so be it. This is the main quality, among several attractive others, that made him such a treasured star.
Donat began his film career in minor movies like the stagy Cash (1933), where a man warns him, “Not so much of your sex appeal!” as they jostle together on a train. His sex appeal was then showcased in a film that became a hit and instant classic, Korda’s The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), where Charles Laughton ate up the screen and won an Oscar but the 28 year-old Donat won the hearts of the ladies with his smoky voice and his ardent reading of the clichéd line, “We can’t go on like this!” to Binnie Barnes. Hollywood noticed him, and he went out there just once to do The Count of Monte Cristo, a film that played on how appealing he could be in a victimized situation and also the stubbornness that could plot out revenge for years and years.
Back in England, Donat lucked out and worked with the finest director there, Alfred Hitchcock, on another instant classic, The 39 Steps (1935). As Richard Hanney in that film, Donat is mustached, slightly rakish and suave, but distant, too. He hid all of his vulnerability and sensitivity and offered us a man so cool, hard and stoic that the most outlandish adventures and misadventures don’t seem to faze him. He’s very adroit when called upon to give an impromptu speech at a political meeting, but speeches were always a Donat specialty, and in this scene he sends up this specialty very amusingly. He reacts tenderly to Peggy Ashcroft’s abused farmwife, but Donat is not above using Gable-like force here when handcuffed to the luscious blond Madeleine Carroll, who is sexy in just the right way for Hitch. There is no sexier moment in movies, in fact, than the scene where Carroll takes off her wet stockings, in close-up, as Donat diffidently stares at her bare legs. John Gielgud wrote that he was shocked during the making of The Secret Agent (1936) when Hitchcock openly joked on the set about Carroll’s affair with Donat as they shot The 39 Steps. Their chemistry with each other on screen and off adds a lot to one of Hitch’s best entertainments.
An established star now after three hits in a row, Donat made two films that must have sounded good on paper but didn’t work out too well on screen, The Ghost Goes West (1935) and Knight Without Armour (1937), both in England and both for French directors, René Clair and Jacques Feyder. In the first, set in Scotland, Donat plays a dual role as the ghost of a rough ladies’ man and a much shyer fellow, so that his gentle/rough persona was split in two, which had the effect, alas, of draining the life out of both halves. Marlene Dietrich, his co-star in the interminable Russian revolution movie Knight, told her husband, “Papilein, did you know that Robert Donat is married? On the screen, he doesn’t look like that at all!…He is so beautiful! In this film, they won’t know who to look at first—him or me.” But he was very ill during shooting, and though this brought out Marlene’s famed maternal side, she was disappointed in his polite Britishness. They have little chemistry on screen.
After these misfires, Donat came fully to life in what might be his best, most characteristic performance in King Vidor’s The Citadel, a story of a struggling doctor who becomes corrupted. Up against formidable talents like Ralph Richardson, Emlyn Williams and Rex Harrison, Donat is touched by true grace and inspiration, opening up his tired face so that it seems beautiful indeed, not because of the face itself, necessarily, but because of the soul of the man behind it. He’s extremely vivid here when he gets righteously angry, so vivid that it’s almost like seeing an electrifying actor at close range on stage, and he creates a shy chemistry with a restrained Rosalind Russell. In this movie, one of Vidor’s best and most personal, Donat in his first scenes makes being a good man seem exciting just as he makes being a bad, selfish man, as he is in some of the later scenes, seem just awful. It all ends with a perfect Donat harangue in court where his character finds himself again, a man open to life willing to pay the price for fighting for what he believes in.
The teacher in Goodbye Mr. Chips is a straight-up character role, and Donat is irresistible in it. He starts the film at the age of eighty-three, and he really does seem that old, squinting yet letting his face droop, too. He’s a crotchety old guy, and when the film flashes back, we can see that Chips was a crotchety young guy, too, much too shy to be anything but quietly disappointed when he gets passed over for a promotion at school. The magic of Donat’s performance in this movie is that when Chips meets Greer Garson’s Katherine, her love for him makes Chips gradually seem a bit younger, so that Donat slightly reverses the aging process for his character during the years of happiness Chips shares with his wife. Katherine brings out things in Chips that have remained hidden, like his humor, and she makes him the teacher and person he has always wanted to be. Her death in childbirth is an enormous blow to him, as are the deaths of many of his boys during the first World War, but Donat lets us see that Chips is stoic in the face of these misfortunes. He knows he’s lucky to have met Katherine in the first place, and lucky to have been a teacher all his life to all these boys who needed him and loved him. It’s the ultimate teacher movie, and the height of Donat’s career.
During World War II, Donat stayed in England and made two propaganda films, Carol Reed’s well-paced The Young Mr. Pitt (1942), where he was ideally cast as the British Prime Minister William Pitt, a sickly man who led his people through a lengthy war, and The Adventures of Tartu (1943), an enjoyable espionage movie where his spy amused himself by impersonating a very silly Romanian playboy. His understanding wife Ella and his three children lived in America during the war; they divorced in 1946.
There was a modest film with Deborah Kerr, Vacation from Marriage (1945), and he briefly played Parnell in Captain Boycott (1947). In The Winslow Boy (1948), an adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s play, Donat looks alarmingly dead-tired and ill; he no longer has the forcefulness he had in the 1930s when he argues in the film’s many courtroom scenes. He directed himself in a small comedy, The Cure for Love (1949), where he fell back on his Manchester accent and played with the woman who became his second wife, Renée Asherson. In color, he played inventor William Friese-Greene in The Magic Box (1951), a man who was always being disappointed. Donat’s health took a turn for the worse at this point, and he had to content himself with recording poetry at home, but he rallied for one last bit of work, winning great acclaim on stage in 1953 in T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral and playing a dying vicar in the film Lease of Life in 1954.
In 1958, he managed one final film, the stodgy Ingrid Bergman vehicle The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, where he played The Mandarin, a Chinese judge; it’s a shame that his swan song saw him in yellow face in such a sentimental, pedestrian movie. He died shortly after filming, from an undiagnosed brain tumor. Donat had made only nineteen movies in all, some of which were not worthy of him. But in the mid-thirties and early forties, and in The Citadel especially, he was an undoubted and special star, a kind of male Margaret Sullavan, a man who held back for his own health until he felt the need to speak out. The fact that speaking out seemed to cost him only added to his appeal and to the bit of romance that still clings to his name: Robert Donat.
by Dan Callahan