, and many plays by George Bernard Shaw (oddly, he didn't do much Shakespeare, but his background in Shaw helped him over the hurdles of Warner Brothers' expository dialogue). His influence extended far past his own work: as a teacher at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, he counted John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier and Charles Laughton among his students. To Gielgud, he bequeathed his airy vowels, to Olivier, his razor-sharp consonants, and to Laughton, arguably the most important of the three, he taught a way of working that treated the creation of a performance as a slow, detail-based process that scorned the achievement of instant results in rehearsal and cultivated more subterranean means of expression.
Rains labored over a character methodically, as if he were building a house, or giving birth, and when it came time for the performance, his fellow actors were invariably startled by the smoothness of his finished work after he had stumbled and tried things throughout the rehearsal period. The young Rains was also catnip to women, apparently, and he married six times. Gielgud remembered that "all the girls in class were hopelessly in love with him," and also recalled a time when Rains "once appeared with Beatrix Thomson, to whom he was then married, in a cast that included two of his former wives.
" One can imagine Rains keeping a situation like that just on the verge of boiling over, and enjoying the tensions as if they were a show, as he did in so many of his films. He made his movie debut, at 44, in (1933), so that we grew accustomed to that alarming voice before we saw the shrunken, wry face and the neat little body. In the few films he made after that, before signing with Warner Brothers, Rains is a bit thundery and theatrical; he hadn't learned yet what will work on screen, but in the daily grind at the overworked Warners lot, he began to play to the camera subtly and confidentially, as if he were sharing a secret with it, a joke, or a livid sense of betrayal.
For he usually played outsiders, men who scoffed insecurely on the outskirts of eternal triangles. You never knew where you stood with Claude Rains: he seemed capable of anything beneath the rigidity of his dandyish control. He may have been just a side dish in some films, but there's no denying the passion and depth of his extra-calibrated relish.
, and many plays by George Bernard Shaw (oddly, he didn't do much Shakespeare, but his background in Shaw helped him over the hurdles of Warner Brothers' expository dialogue).
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