Ray Milland

Ray Milland

Welsh actor Ray Milland spent the 1930s and early 1940s playing light romantic leads in such films as Next Time We Love (1936); Three Smart Girls (1936); Easy Living (1937), in which he is especially charming opposite Jean Arthur in an early Preston Sturges script; Everything Happens at Night (1939); The Doctor Takes a Wife (1940); and the major in Billy Wilder's The Major and the Minor opposite Ginger Rogers. Others worth watching are Reap the Wild Wind (1942); Forever and a Day (1943), and Lady in the Dark (1944). He made The Uninvited in 1944 and won an Oscar for his intense and realistic portrait of an alcoholic in The Lost Weekend (1945). Unfortunately, it was one of his last good films or performances. With the exception of Dial M for Murder (1954), X, The Man With X-Ray Eyes (1953), Love Story (1970), and Escape to Witch Mountain (1975), his later career was made up of mediocre parts in mostly bad films. One of the worst and most laughable was the horror film The Thing with Two Heads (1972), which paired him with football player Rosie Grier as the two-headed monster. Milland was also an uninspired director in A Man Alone (1955), Lisbon (1956), The Safecracker (1958), and Panic in Year Zero (1962). ~ All Movie Guide