One of the most unintentionally funny lines in film history was in The Portrait Of Dorian Gray (1945) when Dorian (Hurd Hatfield), who is supposed to be going to a ball, comes downstairs in his dressing gown. His surprised fiancée, already in evening dress says, "But Dorian, you haven't changed."
Hurd Hatfield, who has died aged 80, had hardly changed when I met him at his large country house in Ireland in 1991. At 73, he retained the handsome, youthful features that got him his most celebrated screen role. I spent the night in the cold, eerie house, much of which had recently been destroyed in a fire. Hatfield treated me to good wine and food, as well as a host of tales (oft-told) of his life in Hollywood in the 1940s.
I had gone to interview him about his role in The Diary Of A Chambermaid (1946), directed by Jean Renoir, whose biography I was writing. He was delighted to be talking about something other than Dorian Gray, which had been "both a blessing and a curse." A blessing in that it gave him a reputation; a curse in that he found it difficult to escape.
In the Renoir movie, Hatfield was ideal as Georges Lanlaire, the indolent, tubercular son of the French bourgeois family that employs Celestine (Paulette Goddard), the chambermaid of the title. Hatfield complained that Goddard was wrong in the part because of her "brassy American accent". His own American accent was slight, and his voice mellifluous, which he used to effect in a number of classic plays on stage, and in some of his better film roles.
He was born William Rukard Hurd Hatfield in New York City, and at the age of 19 won a scholarship to study in England at the Michael Chekhov Theatre and Drama School in Devon. When the company toured the US in 1939, he played Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night, Gloucester in King Lear and Kirolov in The Possessed, based on the Dostoevsky novel. While performing in Los Angeles, the Anglo-Saxon looking Hatfield gained a contract with MGM for the part of Lao San, a Chinese peasant (the younger brother of Katharine Hepburn's Jade) in an adaptation of Pearl S Buck's Dragon Seed (1944).
Nobody who saw him in oriental make-up could have recognised him in Albert Lewin's The Picture of Dorian Gray the following year. Variety commented: "Hatfield, as pretty boy Gray, is singularly narcissistic all the way and plays it with little feeling, as apparently intended." In fact, he is particularly impressive in an almost impossible role.
From then on, Hatfield would play mostly decadent characters. In Michael Curtiz's The Unsuspected (1947), he was a dipsomaniac married to a nymphomaniac; in The Checkered Coat (1948), he played a psychopathic killer whose downfall results from his cataleptic seizures, and was a killer on the loose in Chinatown At Midnight (1949).
His desire for greater challenges led Hatfield to return to the stage in 1952, appearing as a studious young man in Christopher Fry's blank-verse comedy Venus Observed, which starred Rex Harrison and Lilli Palmer; in the title role of Julius Caesar at the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut, in 1955; and as Don John in John Gielgud's production of Much Ado About Nothing (1959) on Broadway. He returned to the screen in Arthur Penn's first feature The Left-Handed Gun (1958), brilliantly sly as the partner of Billy the Kid (Paul Newman), who betrays the outlaw. Moving from this Judas character, he was well cast as Pontius Pilate, brightening up Nicholas Ray's interminable King Of Kings (1961).
In Penn's self-consciously arty Mickey One (1961), Hatfield gave an intriguing performance as the nightclub owner with an insidious homosexual hold over singer Warren Beatty. Continuing to exploit his effete persona, Hatfield was cast as Paul Bern, Jean Harlow's impotent husband, who committed suicide, in Harlow (1965), the Carol Lynley cheapie version.
After a few more films, Hatfield settled in Ireland in 1972, where he spent his time mainly working on his estate. But in the 1980s, he toured extensively in his one-man play, The Son Of Whistler's Mother, perfectly portraying the American artist James McNeill Whistler. There were also some movies in his later years, including two for Bruce Beresford, Crimes Of The Heart (1986) and Her Alibi (1989). But because of his most famous role, whatever he did or wherever he went, people could not refrain from making some comment on his looks. "We suffer for what the gods give us, and I'm afraid Dorian Gray will pay for his good looks," says the painter in Oscar Wilde's story.