System Mechanic - Clean, repair, protect, and speed up your PC!James Mason, Actor
May 15, 1909 - July 27, 1984
James Mason was born on May 15, 1909, Hudersfield, Yorkshire, England. He attended Marlborough and Cambridge, where he discovered acting on a lark and abandoned a planned career as an architect. Following work in stock companies, he joined the Old Vic under the guidance of Sir Tyrone Guthrie and of Alexander Korda, who gave Mason at least one small film role in 1933, but fired him a few days into shooting.
Mason remained in the theatre becoming a prominent stage actor, meanwhile getting first small, then rapidly larger roles in "quota quickies", minor films made to accommodate laws mandating a certain percentage of films shown in Britain to be British-made. Mason's talent for playing protagonists of a decidedly hard-bitten or melancholy stripe brought him from these minor films to a position as one of Britain's major film stars of the Forties in such films as The Seventh Veil (1945) and Odd Man Out (1947).
In 1949 he went to Hollywood, where he made two films with Max Ophuls, Caught and The Reckless Moment (both 1949), played Rommel twice, in The Desert Fox (1951) and The Desert Rats (1953), played Brutus to Marlon Brando's Anthony in Julius Caesar (1953), and starred with Judy Garland in A Star is Born (1954).
He returned to Britain in 1953 to make The Man Between. He continued to play significant roles on both sides of the Atlantic until his death, of a heart attack in 1984 at his home in Switzerland, at age 75. Mason was awarded a posthumous UK Film Critics award in 1985 for his part in The Shooting Party. Mason was married twice; to Pamela Mason (February 1941 - 1964) (divorced); two children; and to Clarissa Kaye-Mason (August 1971 - 1984) (his death).
