David Niven

James David Graham Niven (March 1910 – 29 July 1983) was an English actor and novelist. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in Separate Tables (1958). Other noted films included A Matter of Life and Death, Around the World in 80 Days, The Pink Panther and as James Bond in Casino Royale (1967).
David Niven, whose clipped accent and thin moustache made him the personification of the British gentleman in more than 90 films spread over nearly half a century.
To generations of English-speaking peoples he was more than a first-rate film actor. Niven authored several books, including two well-received autobiographical memoirs, The Moon’s a Balloon and Bring on the Empty Horses, which confirmed Niven’s reputation as a raconteur.
More than that, the books attested to the fact that Niven – a man of considerable charm, wit and sophistication – had an extraordinary life Filled with such entertainment industry giants as Darryl F. Zanuck, Errol Flynn and Humphrey Bogart, and political figures such as Winston Churchill and John F. Kennedy.
Niven was born March 1, 1910, in Kirriemuir, Scotland, the son of an army reserve lieutenant who was to die five years later during the World War I Gallipoli campaign.
Niven’s widowed, financially strapped mother moved to England and young David bounced around from school to school. He finally ended up at Sandhurst.
Young Niven’s military career was relatively brief and undistinguished. He served three years as a lieutenant in a Scottish infantry regiment, two of them on the hot, dusty island of Malta where he did little more than polish his skills in rugby and polo – on horses borrowed from other officers because young Niven had little money of his own.
Niven disliked the army – he had gone to Sandhurst for lack of anything more promising to do – and the future of a junior officer in the peacetime army seemed dim.
The frustrations came to a head when Niven insulted a general and, rather than face court martial, resigned his commission in 1932.
Niven sailed off to Canada to visit friends, then went on to New York City where other friends, capitalizing on the end of Prohibition, hired him as a wholesale alcohol salesman. But Niven flopped at that, and was little more successful at his next try – promoting a sort of rodeo-equestrian show in Atlantic City.
The unemployed but always – charming Niven drifted west to California, helped, as always, by a large circle of British friends and acquaintances. Encouraged by his friends, Niven signed on at Central Casting on Western Avenue. They listed him, back in 1935, as “English type, No. 2008. Niven, David.”
Niven was on his way – slowly.
A chance meeting with old military friends on a British cruiser in Santa Barbara Bay led to a hangover and an introduction to director Frank Lloyd, who later signed him as an extra in the original Mutiny on the Bounty – Niven’s first film appearance.
Lloyd passed him on to another leading director of the period, Edmund Goulding, who had Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer do a screen test, which got Niven nowhere. Another screen test of sorts – an appearance at Paramount before Mae West – was also in vain.
Yet another screen test ended in failure when newcomers Fred MacMurray and Ray Milland both got contracts with Paramount after appearing opposite Claudette Colbert. But Niven, the third man tried out that day, got nothing.
There were occasional jobs as a $2.50-a-day extra – the first one was as a spray-painted Mexican in a low-budget cowboy film – but for a while it looked as if Niven wasn’t going to make it, despite his charm and growing circle of friends.
Then the immigration authorities intervened; pointing out that Niven’s visitor’s permit had long since expired. Niven was forced to take off for the Mexican border, hiring out as a gun bearer for rich U.S. tourists hunting in the hills around the then small, dusty border town of Mexicali.
At last, Niven got lucky when the legendary Samuel Goldwyn viewed his initial screen test, liked what he saw, and signed Niven to a 7-year contract starting at $100 a week.
Most of the parts were small at first. In Howard Hawks’ production of The Barbary Coast (1935), Niven played a Cockney sailor. He was signed the next year to play a bit part in the Jeanette MacDonald – Nelson Eddy opus Rose-Marie, but after filming his brief scene he left the studio, only to find out months later that his part had been re-shot with another actor.
The roles quickly got better. Niven played an officer and friend of Errol Flynn in The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), Capt. Clyde Lockert in Dodsworth (1936) and Fritz von Tarlenheim in The Prisoner of Zenda (1937). In 1938, Niven appeared in the classic The Dawn Patrol and the following year gained co-star status for the first time in Bachelor Mother with Ginger Rogers. Later in 1939, he played opposite Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon as the devoted but unloved Edgar Linton, Miss Oberon’s husband in Wuthering Heights.
Despite the early frustrations, only four years after arriving in Hollywood, the one-time British officer had become a genuine star, critically well received and an actor of increasing capability. Life outside the studios also was happy. Niven dated Hollywood’s most beautiful women, shared a beach house with Flynn, and was a friend of the industry’s most talented stars and directors – people like Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Fred Astaire, Ronald Colman and William Wyler. And he was a frequent guest of William Randolph Hearst at San Simeon.
But then World War II intervened.
Though he had long ago resigned his commission and probably would not have been drafted into service, Niven left Los Angeles soon after Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, and after several false starts managed to return to England and gain a commission in an infantry regiment. He was assigned to a training battalion and, he claimed much later, out of infinite boredom volunteered for the newly formed commando units.
Niven, never at a loss for friends throughout his life, made a new one in Churchill, who occasionally invited him to his estate on weekends.
Niven saw action in Europe after the Normandy invasion and married an English girl, Primula Rollo, who was to bear him two sons. Niven rose from the rank of captain to lieutenant colonel during the war, and took time off to do a film overseas – The Way Ahead (1944), a glorification of the British infantryman.
The film, a government-backed propaganda effort, was directed by Carol Reed and written by Eric Ambler and Peter Ustinov. Ustinov, then a private in the army, doubled as Niven’s orderly when they moved into London’s Ritz Hotel to work on the movie.
Niven did another film in England – Stairway to the Stars (1946) and then returned to Hollywood. But it was a difficult time for Niven. His wife died in an accident at the age of 25 and his Broadway debut in 1951 as Gloria Swanson’s lover in the unsuccessful Nina was a failure.
Later in the 1950s, life picked up for Niven when he married a young Swedish model, Hjordis Tersmeden. They were to adopt two girls. Then – with Dick Powell and Charles Boyer – he started the hugely successful television firm, Four Star Productions.
There was no fourth star, by the way, because, according to Niven, most of Hollywood was frightened by the power of the film studio bosses. But the production company was an incredible success. Producing The Rifleman with Chuck Connors, and Wanted Dead or Alive, starring an unknown named Steve McQueen.
It went on that way through the late 1950s and early 1960s. Four Star in one year had 14 TV series on the air. Niven was suddenly one of the richest men in Hollywood. He decided to take his money and his family to Europe—permanently.
Niven and his family moved to a chalet in Switzerland and later, a villa on the French Riviera. It was an expensive life style – skiing the best slopes and entertaining his next-door neighbours, Princess Grace and Prince Ranier of Monaco – and Niven managed it by working a good deal of the time on films, both good and bad.
He turned down the role of Humbert Humbert in Lolita because he feared it would tarnish his gentlemanly image, but he had a long list of successes.
There was The Bishop’s Wife (1947), The Moon Is Blue (1953), Around the World in 80 Days (1956), Bonjour Tristesse (1958), Separate Tables (1958), Please Don’t Eat the Daisies (1960), The Guns of Navarone (1961) and the original The Pink Panther (1963), to name some of the better ones.
Niven liked to say his career was composed of playing officers, dukes and crooks, but he won an Academy Award as best actor in one of them, Separate Tables, in which he portrayed a retired British officer.
The Oscar-winning actor died at his chalet on 29 July 1983 aged 73, and buried in Château-d’Œx cemetery, Switzerland. A Thanksgiving service for Niven was held at St Martin-in-the-Fields, London, on 27 October 1983. The congregation of 1,200 included Prince Michael of Kent, Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, Sir John Mills, Sir Richard Attenborough, Trevor Howard, David Frost, Joanna Lumley, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and Lord Olivier.
In 1985, Niven was included in a series of British postage stamps, along with Sir Alfred Hitchcock, Sir Charles Chaplin, Peter Sellers and Vivien Leigh, to commemorate British Film Year.

Key Films:

A Matter of Life and Death (1946)
After miraculously surviving a jump from his burning plane, RAF pilot Peter Carter (Niven) encounters the American radio operator (Kim Hunter) to whom he has just delivered his dying wishes, and, face-to-face on a tranquil English beach, the pair fall in love. When a messenger from the hereafter arrives to correct the bureaucratic error that spared his life, Peter must mount a fierce defence for his right to stay on earth – painted by production designer Alfred Junge and cinematographer Jack Cardiff as a rich Technicolor Eden – climbing a wide staircase to stand trial in a starkly beautiful, black-and-white modernist afterlife.

Around the World in 80 Days (1956)
In 1872, an English gentleman Phileas Fogg claims he can circumnavigate the world in eighty days. He makes a £20,000 wager with four sceptical fellow members of the Reform Club (each contributing £5,000 to the bet) that he can arrive back eighty days from exactly 8:45 pm that evening.
Together with his resourceful valet, Passepartout, Fogg goes hopscotching around the globe generously spending money to encourage others to help him get to his destinations faster so he can accommodate tight steamship schedules.

Separate Tables (1958)
The film is set in a hotel and it follows a group of the guests there who lead their separate lives and rarely interact together. The film showcases the coldness of people, their distant behaviour, repressed sexuality and especially the alienation that some feel in society and it does portray all of those themes beautifully.
Separate Tables is one of those very talkative, theatrical movies in a sense that it’s somewhat stagey and obviously based on a play.
Niven is very good in what is the most intriguing, brave role here. Rarely do we see sexually repressed characters portrayed in the fifties period, but here they did that really well and Major Pollock surely is such a moving, again relatable, very complex character.
The film was nominated for seven Oscars, and won two (Niven for Best Actor and Hiller for Best Supporting Actress).

Guns of Navarone (1961)
This classic wartime adventure is based on Alistair MacLean’s bestselling novel about a daring commando raid on two giant German guns that are threatening British naval operations in the Aegean Sea.
Mountaineering expert Gregory Peck is handed the task of leading the six-man mission and he’s well supported by Anthony Quinn as a brooding Greek freedom fighter. Completing the wartime “Magnificent Six” are Anthony Quayle, Stanley Baker, James Darren and David Niven, who steals the acting honours here as a cynical explosives expert whose laid-back attitude is put to the test when the mission starts to go awry.
Nominated for seven Academy Awards, it only won for special effects but then it was released in the same year as the Oscar-winning West Side Story.

Top 10 Films:
Wuthering Heights (1939)
Raffles (1940)
A Matter of Life and Death (1946)
The Bishop’s Wife (1947)
Appointment with Venus (1951)
Around the World in 80 Days (1956)
Separate Tables (1958)
The Guns of Navarone (1961)
The Pink Panther (1964)
Casino Royale (1967)

Source: Michael Seiler, www.latimes.com and en.wikipedia.org, www.criterion.com, www.radiotimes.com