Robert Donat

Friedrich Robert Donat (18 March 1905 – 9 June 1958), was an English film and stage actor.

Early life

Donat was born in Withington, Manchester, England, to Ernst Emil Donat and his wife Rose Alice (née Green) who were married at Withington, St Paul, in 1895. He was of English, Polish and German descent and was educated at Manchester’s Central High School for Boys.

Career

He made his first stage appearance in 1921 and his film debut in 1932 in Men of Tomorrow. His first great screen success came with The Private Life of Henry VIII, playing Thomas Culpepper.

He had a successful screen image as an English gentleman who was neither haughty nor common. That made him something of a novelty in British films at the time, and he was likened by critics to Hollywood's Clark Gable and Gary Cooper. His most successful films included The Ghost Goes West (1935), Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (1935), The Citadel (1938), for which he received his first Oscar nomination, and Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939). For the last, he won the Academy Award for Best Actor, over Clark Gable for Gone with the Wind, Laurence Olivier for Wuthering Heights, James Stewart for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Mickey Rooney for Babes in Arms. He was a major theatre star, noted for his performances on the British stage in Shaw's The Devil's Disciple (1938) and Heartbreak House (1942), Much Ado About Nothing (1946), and especially as Thomas Becket in T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral at the Old Vic Theatre (1952).

Donat lobbied hard to be cast in two film roles, neither of which he gained. He wanted to play the Chorus in Olivier's Henry V, but the role went to Leslie Banks, and he longed desperately to be cast against type as Bill Sikes in David Lean's Oliver Twist, but Lean thought him wrong for the part and cast Robert Newton instead.

According to Judy Garland in an interview, although she first sang "You Made Me Love You" for Clark Gable, she felt bad because she really wanted to sing it for her idol Donat whom she wrote a fan letter to a few years before, after seeing The Count of Monte Cristo (1934).

Personal life and death

Donat suffered from chronic asthma which affected his career and limited him to appearing in only twenty films. Author David Shipman speculates that Donat's asthma may have been psychosomatic: "His tragedy was that the promise of his early years was never fulfilled and that he was haunted by agonies of doubt and disappointment (which probably were the cause of his chronic asthma)";^[1] however, this has never been substantiated. Donat's final role was the mandarin Yang Cheng in The Inn of the Sixth Happiness (1958). He died on 9 June 1958 aged 53 in London, England. His biographer Kenneth Barrow writes on the cause of his death: "Perhaps the asthma had weakened him but, in fact, it was discovered he had a brain tumour the size of a duck egg and cerebral thrombosis was certified as the primary cause of death."^[2]

Donat was twice married, first to Ella Annesley Voysey (1929-1946), with whom he had three children, and subsequently to British actress Renée Asherson (1953-1958). His nephew is the actor Peter Donat.

Robert Donat has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for motion pictures at 6420 Hollywood Blvd.

Filmography

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Robert Donat

• Robert Donat at the Internet Movie Database
• Robert Donat archive at the University of Bristol Theatre Collection- University of Bristol
• papers of Robert Donat, University of Manchester
• Photographs and literature