Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1939)

The grim realities of the North Country and a Shakespearean tour (far right, in "Julius Caesar") helped prepare Robert Donat for his role in "Goodbye, Mr. Chips" A glimpse into the littleknown private life of a handsome Britisher whose career started with a laugh BY CAROLINE LEJEUNE if ^j Oma^ DRIVING through the dark Buckinghamshire lanes to hear Robert Donat give his midnight "Citadel" broadcast to America, I sank back against the cushions and lounged and thought. I thought, it's lucky I knew Robert Donat when, or I shouldn't be writing this article. Robert is the friendliest soul alive, but if you didn't know him when, you never really knew him. The whole secret of the Donat success is back in those early years when he tramped the Manchester pavements and talked without any broad a's, spoke rough and lived tough like all of us who were raised in that dour North Country of cobblestones and "bally big cart horses." It's a funny thing, when you come to think of it, what the north does for our actors. There must be something in the smutty air of the northern factory towns, or the sleet and the rain and the hard, uncoddled childhoods, that brings out the grit and the human touch in people. We don't waste time in the north. When we think a thing, we say it. When we want a thing, wo go out and get it. Our actors have learned their job in the best school of all, the school of the common people. Look at Charles Laughton, born and bred in the Yorkshire dales. Look at Gracie Fields, a part-timer in the mills at ten. Look at Robert Donat, speaking to the world tonight from his private study like the King at Sandringham. . . . As we started the long climb up the outskirts of the Chilterns, through pinewoods and larchwoods to the Donat home, I thought of the grey little street where Robert was born. I KNEW that street so well. It was just around the corner from my own home. St. Paul's Road, Withington, a drab cul-de-sac behind a church in a Manchester suburb. The Donat house was the last in the row, and grimy fields, now built over, crept up to the garden. Donat senior, who loved flowers, made the best job he could out of a few gallant rose trees struggling against the Manchester soot. There were stunted apple trees with a few green apples, and an ancient glass vinery. The young Donats went to school by streetcar, which we in Manchester called "the tram." Their education cost them threepence a week, and the boys themselves had to bring the money. Every Monday morning the teacher rapped on his desk and called out, "Fees, please," and Robert would hand up his three pennies, wrapped in a twist of paper. No pennies, no school. He was always a lonely little boy. He never went about in a gang, like his brothers. Sometimes he used to go scorching along the sidewalks on his tricycle, but more often he shut himself up in his room, reading, or reciting poetry out loud to himself. He was nervous and imaginative. Often, when he was left alone in the house on winter evenings, he would listen to the rain pattering on the roof of the vinery and go into a cold sweat of terror. His brain created all sorts of bogeys. He heard Things and saw Things in the dark, but he never told anybody. When Robert was eleven years old, his motherdecided that he must take elocution lessons to get rid of his broad North-Country accent. In Lancashire and Yorkshire we say our a's short and reverse our oo and u sounds, making soot sound like sut and butter like booter. So Robert's parents scraped the fees together somehow, and the boy was sent, after school hours, to study with a local elocution (Continued on page 82)