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ighty years ago, Universal released Gregory La Cava’s My Man Godfrey, a now-classic screwball comedy about a dizzy socialite who is assigned to find a “forgotten man” as part of a scavenger hunt. She brings a hobo back from the city dump, persuades him to become her butler, and, in due course, falls for him. My Man Godfrey is sharply critical of the monied milieu in which it is set, yet the populist satirical tone of the screenplay is not what contemporary viewers would find least predictable about the film. Far more surprising is that the title role is played by a middle-aged man.

William Powell was 44 when My Man Godfrey was filmed. He was 16 years older than his co-star, Carole Lombard, and 11 years older than Clark Gable had been two years earlier when Gable had starred in the seminal screwball comedy It Happened One Night. A trained stage actor who had begun making movies in 1922, he did not come into his own until he signed with MGM and appeared opposite Myrna Loy in The Thin Man in 1934. From then on, though, he was a star in every sense, so much so that he was billed above Lombard in My Man Godfrey.

Powell’s age, far from being an obstacle to his stardom, was central to it. Even though he specialized in light comedy, his sardonic screen persona had an underlying weight that allowed him to bring off dramatic roles no less convincingly. Without it, he couldn’t have essayed the tricky title role of My Man Godfrey. His contempt for the irresponsible frivolity of the rich eccentrics among whom he finds himself is made explicit in the screenplay (“I was curious to see how a bunch of empty-headed nitwits conducted themselves”). Yet he also comes across as a man to whom a beautiful young woman like Lombard might plausibly be attracted, and it is in no way dramatically unsatisfactory when they fall in love.

While Powell was older than most of the other male screen stars of his day, he was in no way uncharacteristic of them. With few exceptions, their screen personas were unequivocally adult. To compare such studio-era screen idols as Powell, Gable, Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, and Spencer Tracy to (say) Tom Cruise, Matt Damon, or Leonardo DiCaprio is to see at once how completely Hollywood has reoriented itself toward youth and how completely the male actors themselves strive to remain “relatable” to teenagers. (Cruise, for example, is now 54, yet he remains almost entirely boyish. He has a 21-year-old son but could never convincingly play the middle-aged father of a man in his majority.) Even such “action stars” as Errol Flynn and John Wayne carried themselves with a natural gravity that would be out of place in most of today’s movies.

It is this quality that explains one of the most striking phenomena of Hollywood’s golden age, the existence of mature male “character stars” who, while not quite popular enough to carry a film on their own, were nonetheless known to moviegoers of all ages. A few, like Powell and Charles Boyer, were treated by the system as full-fledged leading men and billed accordingly, while others, like Claude Rains, stuck to supporting roles. But all reflected the same expectation of maturity that was a defining element of prewar filmmaking, and their work gave a unique richness of texture to the casting of studio-era films that has vanished now that youth is so overwhelmingly dominant on screen.

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he careers of Boyer and Rains are exemplary of the lost art of the mature character star. Both men were older European stage actors (Rains was born in England in 1889, Boyer in France a decade later) who moved to the U.S. in the 1930s and soon thereafter established themselves at the major studios. Between them, they made well over a hundred films in Hollywood and received four Oscar nominations each, though neither won the prize. While Rains is better known today, thanks to his having had the luck to appear in such well-remembered pictures as The Adventures of Robin Hood and Casablanca, Boyer was far more famous in his lifetime, so much so that he became the model for a cartoon character, Chuck Jones’s Pepé le Pew. Yet they were regarded by their peers with like admiration, and their best films show that they worked in a broadly similar way.

What David Thomson has written of Rains was no less true of Boyer: “Technically, he often filled roles that were leads, but he treated them as character parts.” He did this in part because he had no alternative. Short, stocky and balding, Boyer looked nothing like the proverbial romantic leading man. What made him a star was his uncanny ability to enhance the performances of the celebrated actresses whose lovers he played, among them Ingrid Bergman, Bette Davis, Irene Dunne, Greta Garbo, Olivia de Havilland, and Hedy Lamarr. It was Lamarr with whom he shared the screen in John Cromwell’s Algiers (1938), the film that made him a celebrity (in which, however, he did not in fact say, “Come wiz me to ze Casbah,” the apocryphal line with which, like Bogart’s “Play it again, Sam,” his name is linked). Instead of trying to upstage his scene partners, he uplifted and complemented them, knowing that his mellifluous voice and intelligent characterizations—he had studied philosophy at the Sorbonne before going on the stage—would still make an impression.

As a result, Boyer became Hollywood’s all-purpose French lover, capable of moving with ease from comedy-tinted dramas like Frank Borzage’s History Is Made at Night (1937) to the spectacularly villainous role he played in George Cukor’s Gaslight (1944). Even after happily abandoning such parts in late middle age, he never lost his reputation for being the onscreen ladies’ man whom he portrayed most memorably and poignantly in Love Affair (1939), Leo McCarey’s tale of a shipboard romance that is transformed by separation and suffering into the love of a lifetime.¹

Two inches shorter than Boyer, Rains had an equally distinctive speaking voice. “His precise, fine voice can give a chisel edge to the flattest sentiments,” Graham Greene wrote in 1938.² It was so striking that it brought him his first major Hollywood role, that of the mad scientist in James Whale’s 1933 screen version of H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man, who is heard but not seen until the end of the film. In part because of his modest stature, he scarcely ever played screen lovers, though he was more than capable of providing Boyer-like romantic support for women stars, as he did to superlative effect when he co-starred with Bette Davis in Vincent Sherman’s Mr. Skeffington (1944).

Mostly, though, Rains left the lovemaking to his colleagues, more frequently portraying such villains as Prince John in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). Even more satisfying are his portraits of decent but morally compromised men like the district attorney who prosecutes an innocent man in Mervyn LeRoy’s They Won’t Forget (1937) and the corrupt senator in Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). Like Boyer, he had a knack for light comedy but used it instead to hint at the unscrupulous charm of dramatic characters like Captain Renault in Casablanca (1942). He also had a special gift for suggesting weakness, that hardest of qualities to convey compellingly on screen or stage, which he used to unforgettable effect in his greatest film role, that of the lovesick Nazi in Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946) who adores Ingrid Bergman but cannot free himself from the influence of his domineering mother.

For the most part, Rains and Boyer specialized in Hollywood melodramas of varying quality, ennobling them with their presence. But whenever they had the opportunity to appear in films of greater dramatic complexity, as Rains did in Notorious and in Gabriel Pascal’s screen version of George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra (1945) and as Boyer did in Max Ophüls’s The Earrings of Madame de . . . (1953), they rose effortlessly to the occasion, just as they distinguished themselves in their later stage appearances, for which they typically chose serious fare. Indeed, Boyer’s performance in Charles Laughton’s 1949 revival of Shaw’s Don Juan in Hell brought him an entirely new kind of réclame, and the recording of the show released in 1952 proves that in addition to being the quintessential French screen lover, he was also a classical actor of exceptional accomplishment.

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hat made the careers of such actors possible? I’d submit it was the nature of life during the Great Depression.

Then as now, teenagers flocked to the movies—but so, too, did their parents, who had no interest in films about the splendors and miseries of adolescent life. In any case, both generations had been scarred by the continuing economic trauma through which they were still living, which had a profound effect on what they wanted to see on screen. Most teenagers of the ’30s and ’40s assumed that they would go to work or find a husband immediately after graduating from high school. Unless they were rich, those who went to college did so to prepare themselves to enter the world of work—and after 1940, teenage boys expected to go to a war from which they might not return. As a result, they were drawn to films that were consistent with their experience, as well as mature actors to whose own “adultness” they could aspire. Hence the success of the fully adult movie stars, as well as character stars like Boyer, who was 40 (and looked older) when Love Affair was filmed, and Rains, who was 53 when he appeared in Casablanca.

After the war, a new kind of star emerged, exemplified by Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, and James Dean. Visibly and unmistakably younger than their predecessors, these handsome but slightly androgynous men looked—and acted—their age. Yet the phenomenon of the character star did not die out as a result of their success. Indeed, it saw a brief effulgence with the subsequent rise to fame of such older actors as Walter Matthau (born in 1920), Gene Hackman (born in 1930), and Robert Duvall (born in 1931). None was a conventional leading-man type, yet they started appearing in full-fledged starring roles in the early ’70s, a time when commercial American film was striving for a darker, more cynical tone that necessitated the casting of actors capable of embodying the masculine toughness and disillusion that are a product of maturity alone.

All this changed when George Lucas and Steven Spielberg started making big-budget films like Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977) whose simplistic plots and elaborate special effects were specifically intended to titillate an adolescent audience, one whose collective experience was profoundly different from that of its parents and grandparents. Instead of going straight from high school to work, the children of the baby boom experienced a prolongation of youth arising from the desire of their parents to give them an easier life. This is what changed the nature of movies in postwar America—and ultimately put an end to the phenomenon of the character star. We live in a different world now, one in which early maturity is not merely undervalued but actively shunned. It is thus inconceivable that a forty-something actor who looks like William Powell could make any headway in Hollywood today, much less become a name-above-the-title star.

One inevitably wonders what the children of the millennials will make of films like My Man Godfrey and actors like Powell, Charles Boyer, and Claude Rains, not to mention the better-remembered contemporaries with whom they worked. Will the unabashedly adult demeanor of these men, and of such similarly inclined actresses of the period as Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, and Barbara Stanwyck, seem even more alien to them? Or will the harshness of life in the 21st century force them to stop crying for the moon of eternal youth? If so, they may well come to reject the shallowness of the movies that their parents loved. But they will also have the studio-era films of the ’30s and ’40s—and the ’70s—to show them how mature men and women grapple with the problems of adult life.

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1 In real life, Boyer was the most faithful and devoted of husbands, and when his wife died of cancer in 1979, he committed suicide two days later.
2 Rains’s diction was self-made. Born into near-poverty, he spoke with a Cockney accent that he did not lose until he became a stage manager and started listening to Herbert Beerbohm Tree, his employer, one of the great British stage actors of the Vicwardian era.