Biography
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