Charles Boyer

Boyer trained in drama and started on the stage in France, and by the time Hollywood took a serious interest he had already been making films for a decade. He appeared in more than eighty of them between 1920 and 1976, but the run that built the name began in American pictures in the 1930s, where the industry found a use for a European leading man who could be romantic without being soft.

What he was good at was the sound of controlled intelligence. Boyer talks quietly, and the quieter he gets the further you lean in, which is exactly the mechanism that makes Gaslight work: as Gregory Anton he is patient, reasonable and solicitous, and every reassurance he offers is a small adjustment to somebody else's grip on reality. The same instrument plays the other way in Algiers, where his Pepe le Moko is a thief penned into the Casbah by his own notoriety, and in History Is Made at Night, where he is a headwaiter who behaves like a gentleman because he has decided to. Four Academy Award nominations for Best Actor came out of that career.

He aged into a character actor rather than fighting it. Max Ophuls cast him as the general in The Earrings of Madame de..., a man whose politeness is a weapon; Lubitsch used him as a refugee intellectual named Adam Belinski in Cluny Brown; by the 1960s he was the amused older Frenchman in Barefoot in the Park and one of the many familiar faces filing through Around the World in 80 Days and Is Paris Burning?. Late on, the baron in Stavisky... traded almost entirely on what audiences already assumed about him.