- published: 10 Dec 2012
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Brian Donlevy (February 9, 1901 – April 5, 1972) was an Irish-born American film actor, noted for playing tough guys from the 1930s to the 1960s. He usually appeared in supporting roles. Among his best-known films are Beau Geste (1939) and The Great McGinty (1940). For his role as Sergeant Markoff in Beau Geste he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.
His obituary in The Times newspaper in the United Kingdom stated that "any consideration of the American 'film noir' of the 1940s would be incomplete without him".
Donlevy was born Waldo Brian Donlevy in Portadown, County Armagh, Ireland (now Northern Ireland) to a whiskey distiller and his wife in 1901. When he was 10 months old his parents moved to Racine, Wisconsin. When he was 9 years old, his family moved to Cleveland, Ohio. He lied about his age (he was actually 14) in 1916 so he could join the army. When Mexican rebels under Villa's command raided Columbus, NM, and killed 18 American soldiers and civilians, Gen. John J. Pershing sent American troops to invade Mexico in pursuit of Pancho Villa. Donlevy served with that expedition.
Ray Milland (3 January 1907 – 10 March 1986) was a Welsh actor and director. His screen career ran from 1929 to 1985, and he is best remembered for his Academy Award–winning portrayal of an alcoholic writer in The Lost Weekend (1945), a sophisticated leading man opposite a corrupt John Wayne in Reap the Wild Wind (1942), the murder-plotting husband in Dial M for Murder (1954), and as Oliver Barrett III in Love Story (1970).
Milland was born Alfred Reginald Jones (not Reginald Alfred John Truscott-Jones as has often been stated). His birth was registered in the March Quarter of 1907 in Neath, Wales, and he was the son of Elizabeth Annie (née Truscott) and Alfred Jones. In the 1911 census the family were living at 66 Coronation Road, Mount Pleasant, Neath, Wales. Of his parents, Milland wrote in his 1974 autobiography Wide-Eyed in Babylon, "My father was not a cruel or harsh man. Just a very quiet one. I think he was an incurable romantic and consequently a little afraid of his emotions and perhaps ashamed of them... he had been a young hussar in the Boer War and had been present at the relief of Mafeking. He never held long conversations with anyone, except perhaps with me, possibly because I was the only other male in our family. The household consisted of my mother, a rather flighty and coquettish woman much concerned with propriety and what the neighbours thought.."