Random harvest professional#

At the same theatre, the following year he appeared in Eugène Brieux's Damaged Goods. His fellow Hollywood actors Claude Rains, Herbert Marshall, Cedric Hardwicke, and Basil Rathbone all saw service with the London Scottish in the war.Ĭareer Theatre As poet François Villon in If I Were King (1938)Ĭolman had sufficiently recovered from his wartime injuries to appear at the London Coliseum on 19 June 1916 as Rahmat Sheikh in The Maharani of Arakan, with Lena Ashwell, at the Playhouse in December that year as Stephen Weatherbee in the Charles Goddard/ Paul Dickey play The Misleading Lady, and at the Court Theatre in March 1917 as Webber in Partnership. As a consequence, he was mustered out as invalid in 1915. On 31 October 1914, at the Battle of Messines, Colman was seriously wounded by shrapnel in his ankle, which gave him a limp that he would attempt to hide throughout his acting career. At the outbreak of the First World War, he was mobilised, and sent to France in September 1914. While working as a clerk at the British Steamship Company in the City of London, he joined the London Scottish Regiment in 1909 as a Territorial Army soldier.

Random harvest professional#

He made his first appearance on the professional stage in 1914. He became a well-known amateur actor, and was a member of the West Middlesex Dramatic Society in 1908–09. He intended to study engineering at Cambridge, but his father's sudden death from pneumonia in 1907 made it financially impossible. He was educated at boarding school in Littlehampton, where he discovered that he enjoyed acting, despite his shyness. His surviving siblings were Gladys, Edith, Eric and Freda. Ronald Charles Colman was born in Richmond, Surrey, England, the third son (his eldest brother died in infancy in 1882) and fifth child of Charles Colman, a silk merchant, and his wife Marjory Read Fraser. He was awarded a second star for his television work. In 1947, he won an Academy Award for Best Actor and Golden Globe Award for Best Actor for the film A Double Life.Ĭolman was an inaugural recipient of a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his work in motion pictures. He also played the starring role in the Technicolor classic Kismet (1944), with Marlene Dietrich, which was nominated for four Academy Awards.

Colman starred in several classic films, including A Tale of Two Cities (1935), Lost Horizon (1937) and The Prisoner of Zenda (1937). He received Oscar nominations for Bulldog Drummond (1929), Condemned (1929) and Random Harvest (1942). He was most popular during the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. Ronald Charles Colman (9 February 1891 – ) was an English-born actor, starting his career in theatre and silent film in his native country, then immigrating to the United States and having a successful Hollywood film career.