Ray Milland

Ray Milland went three days without eating before filming the final scenes of The Lost Weekend in 1945. He wanted the dark circles under his eyes to look real and the trembling hands not to look like a makeup trick. He won the Oscar for playing a broken alcoholic, but his road to that podium began among horses and military uniforms in Wales.

Before arriving in Hollywood, he served in the cavalry of the British Royal Guard. His name was Alfred Reginald Jones, and he was a first-class marksman. His first paycheck in film came purely by chance while he was visiting a studio in London to see a friend who worked as an extra.

He chose his stage name inspired by the Millands lands in his native Neath.

It was a purely pragmatic decision.

Leading Man Salary at Paramount

In 1934, he signed a twenty-year contract with Paramount Pictures. During the first decade, he was the friendly face who always got the girl in light comedies. But Milland wanted characters with more edge and less decorative makeup.

Billy Wilder offered the role of Don Birnam when other actors turned it down for fear of damaging their public image. The studio didn't want to make a film about the degradation of alcoholism. They thought audiences would reject such a raw story in the postwar era.

And the gamble paid off.

That Academy Award allowed him to renegotiate his terms and start looking behind the camera. Milland didn't just settle for memorizing other people's lines. In 1955, he directed A Man Alone and made it clear that he had a sharp eye for framing and narrative pacing.

Maturity between terror and craft

When leading roles began to dry up, he didn't retreat to his mansion to wait for calls. He turned to television and genre films. In 1962, he worked with Roger Corman on The Premature Burial and The X-Ray Man.

Many critics of the time didn't understand why an Oscar winner would agree to make B movies. But Milland needed to work, and he enjoyed the technical side of these fast-paced productions. In 1970, he appeared in Love Story, playing the stern father of Ryan O'Neal.

That film became the biggest commercial hit of his late career.

He published his memoir, Wide-Eyed in Babylon, in 1974, in which he spoke with biting honesty about the miseries of the big studios. He didn't use a ghostwriter. He preferred to control every word said about his public and private life.

In 1985, he filmed his last appearance in the TV movie The Gold Key. He died of pancreatic cancer on March 10, 1986, at Torrance Memorial Medical Center in California, at age 79.