By David Raether
“Dreams don’t have an expiration date.”
There are certain actors we always picture in their signature roles when we think of them. Sean Connery, for instance, is always James Bond. Charlie Chaplin is the Little Tramp. Meryl Streep is Sophie Zawistowski in Sophie’s Choice (1982).
When it comes to David Niven, the signature role of his life was simply being David Niven.
Pencil-thin mustache, easy smile, impeccable wardrobe, erect bearing, and a vaguely aristocratic manner, he’s the gentleman at the party who always seems to have people laughing. The one who shows up at a family picnic wearing a sharp blazer and cufflinks and offers up amusing stories about his boat and the people on it. The one who looks at you intently when you talk to him and says, “Oh, my goodness. I can’t believe you got through that. Good for you.” And then puts his hand lightly on your shoulder and vows that you must have lunch together the next time he’s in town. You know, a David Niven.
However, the reality of David Niven’s life was vastly different from that easy and graceful manner he projected. His childhood, in particular, was appallingly difficult.
David Niven was born on March 1st, 1910, in London, England. He was the youngest of four children and was left fatherless at just five years old when his father was killed at Gallipoli in World War I. (By the way, Gallipoli (1981) is a wrenching Australian film made about this battle, which I highly recommend.)
Niven’s mother almost immediately remarried a man with whom she had been having an affair, a man who Niven always referred to as a “creep.” In fact, there was a general belief in the family that Niven’s future stepfather actually fathered him. Niven was sent off to boarding school a year later but was then kicked out of school for mailing his best friend an ornately wrapped box of dog excrement, and expelled from another boarding school due to his involvement in a gang of shoplifters.
When he was 14 years old, Niven’s stepfather claimed there wasn’t room for him to sleep in the family home and found him a room to stay in several miles away in London. Each night after family dinner, he would take the bus across town to his room. Niven later attended Sandhurst—the British equivalent to West Point—and joined the British Army.
While in the Army, Niven appeared in several small theatrical productions in his regiment. In 1933, after growing bored with the Army, he resigned his commission as a Second Lieutenant and went to America. He landed first in New York but decided to make the trek to Los Angeles to attempt a career as an actor.
“This is a terrible confession I have to make. After I left the Army, I had a number of things to try. I had a great conceit to think that if all else failed, I could go to Hollywood. So when all else did fail, I really did go to Hollywood. And then I found out how wrong I was.”
Niven didn’t really fail in Hollywood, though. He started out with small parts in films—sometimes non-speaking—until he was noticed by Samuel Goldwyn, who signed him to a contract with his company, Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM). Substantial parts followed in major films such as The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936) and Prisoner of Zenda (1937). He made sixteen films between 1937 and 1939—and then the war came. Niven re-enlisted in the British Army.
He barely spoke of his service in the Army during World War II, but it was substantial. He landed on Normandy a couple of days after D-Day. He served in a forward reconnaissance unit and was in the Battle of the Bulge. Niven was circumspect about his service and was disdainful of his contemporaries in Hollywood whose publicists promoted their service during the war.
“I will, however, tell you just one thing about the war, my first story and my last. I was asked by some American friends to search for the grave of their son near Bastogne. I found it where they told me I would, but it was among 27,000 others, and I told myself that here, Niven, were 27,000 reasons why you should keep your mouth shut after the war.”
While on leave in 1940, he met Primula Susan Rollo and married her after a whirlwind romance. The couple had two sons together, and in 1946, moved to Los Angeles so Niven could resume his film career. Primula later died in a tragic accident at a friend’s house when she fell and fractured her skull on some stone stairs. She was just 28 years old.
Suddenly a widower and single father at 36 years old, Niven threw himself into his work. He made 13 films over the next five years while working almost non-stop. But he did find some time in there to remarry. In 1948, just two years after the death of his first wife, Niven met a beautiful Swedish fashion model named Hjördis Genberg. They married just weeks after meeting. It reportedly was a tempestuous marriage, although it lasted until Niven’s death. They had two daughters together.
“Stardom is like making love in a hammock—a happy experience, but one of uncertain duration.”
The 1950s saw Niven at the peak of his career. He was the lead in one of the biggest movies of the decade—Around the World in 80 Days (1956)—and also won an Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in Separate Tables (1958). His constant work continued into the 1960s, although with less notoriety. He made 20 pictures during the 60s, including one of my favorites: Casino Royale (1. Niven played one of several James Bonds in this classic spoof on spy movies. It is not considered part of the Bond canon by James Bond fans, but it is a lot of fun and just pure silliness.
Niven continued making films but also began to turn his attention to writing. He was always one of the best storytellers in Hollywood and published two memoirs: The Moon’s a Balloon (1972) and Bring on the Empty Horses (1975). If you like to read Hollywood memoirs, I would especially recommend The Moon’s a Balloon. It’s an absolute delight to read.
“I make two movies a year to take care of the butcher and the baker and the school fees. Then I try to write, but it’s not that easy. Acting is what’s easy.”
In 1980, Niven began to experience fatigue and dizziness. In 1981, he was working in France on a picture his son David Niven Jr. was producing. Niven came back to the U.S. and appeared on The Merv Griffin Show, where he seemed to be unsteady and not his usual sharp self. There was concern at the time that he was either drunk or had had a stroke.
The reality was far worse. Niven was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease). ALS is a horrible neurological disease that is 100% fatal. In February 1983, he was hospitalized and later released after ten days. Niven refused to return to the hospital and died at his chalet in Switzerland five months later, on July 29th. He was buried a few days later in the local cemetery of Château-d'Œx.
Among the praises he received after his death was one particularly telling one—an enormous floral wreath from the porters at London’s Heathrow Airport.
It included an inscription that read:
“To the finest man who ever walked through these halls. He made every porter feel like a king.”
Niven was one of those rare actors who made the audience feel as if they were in on the joke. There was an intimacy in his performances that made us a part of the life he was living on the screen. He was graceful and elegant but never distant or reserved.
“You are not just here to fill space to be a background character in someone else’s movie. Consider this: nothing would be the same if you did not exist. Every place you have ever been and everyone you have ever spoken to would be different without you. We are all connected, and we are all affected by the decisions and even the existence of those around you.”
If you’ve never seen a David Niven movie, it’s time to add these movies to your queue.
This is a magnificent adaptation of Emily Brontë’s novel, directed by William Wyler. The movie significantly shortens and streamlines the story from the novel, and that’s just fine. It’s worth pointing out that Wuthering Heights is one of Niven’s first films, and he more than holds his own with a cast of big names like Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon. If you’re looking for an eerie and romantic movie, this tale of the star-crossed love between Heathcliff (Olivier), Cathy (Oberon), and Edgar (Niven) is the movie for you. It’s not just melodrama, however; there’s a ghost element that makes this story even more enjoyable and creepily fun.
Wuthering Heights is a tense and dramatic film. If you’ve never seen it, go ahead and put it in your queue now. And, if you enjoy it, you might also want to check out The Uninvited (1944), another ghost-filled love story melodrama. (Niven isn’t in it, I’m just quite fond of the movie.)
One of the biggest American movies of the 1950s, Around the World in 80 Days adapts the classic Jules Verne novel about a 19th-century adventurer, Phineas Fogg, who proposes to travel around the world in, you guessed it, 80 days. Niven plays the lead role of Fogg in this film that received eight Academy Award nominations. It won Best Picture, beating out Giant (1956), The King and I (1956), and The Ten Commandments (1956).
Everything about this movie is big. There’s the enormous cast, it’s shot on 70 mm film (in Technicolor), and, of course, there’s the array of global settings. The movie is somewhat lightly-regarded, and that’s probably right. Any screenplay that has S. J. Perelman as a co-writer will have a level of silliness that will undermine just about any serious intentions. Perelman was a longtime writer of comic essays for The New Yorker magazine and scripted two Marx Brothers movies: Monkey Business (1931) and Horse Feathers (1932).
Niven strikes just the right tone as an adventurer who frequently wears a top hat while traveling. Ha! Sure, sometimes you’ll cringe at some of the cultural insensitivities, but I wouldn’t write off the movie just for that—this was over 65 years ago, after all. The cast includes the great Mexican comic actor Cantinflas as Fogg’s loyal assistant Passpartout and Shirley MacLaine as Princess Aouda. The rest of the cast is just too enormous to list, with nearly 50 credited actors. See if you can pick out John Gielgud, Noel Coward, Marlene Dietrich, or Buster Keaton, among many, many others.
I just really enjoy this movie. It’s a lively and amusing tale of adventure and derring-do. Oh, and make sure you check out the credit sequence by acclaimed designer Saul Bass at the movie's end. It’s a fabulous example of 1950s animation style and is considered a bit of a masterpiece of the form.
In this classic 1950s melodrama about a group of lonely people staying at a hotel in the English countryside, Niven plays a World War II veteran, Burt Lancaster is a cynical writer, and Deborah Kerr is the lonely, repressed unmarried woman who finds life closing in on her. Niven won an Academy Award for Best Actor from this performance, and it was well-deserved. His personal wartime experiences clearly informed his performance here, and it’s what I consider to be the high-water mark of his career. At times, this film can get a bit on the pearl-clutching side, but stick with it. It’s a marvelous example of well-executed melodrama—a form that has (regrettably) fallen out of favor lately.
A good melodrama centers on adults dealing with adult problems. You know, the sort of thing that is a part of our everyday lives but never seems to make it into comic book-based movies or animated movies with talking animals, which seem to be all Hollywood can produce lately. Give this one a try and remind yourself there’s more to film than what we’re primarily seeing made these days.
The Guns of Navarone is simply a fabulous military movie with a great cast, including Niven, Gregory Peck, and Anthony Quinn. It’s a tense special-ops story about a team of six men sent to disable a seemingly impossible-to-destroy set of cannons that the Nazis have set up to control naval traffic on the Aegean Sea. However, there’s just one small problem with the team: they don’t really like or trust each other. Nivens plays an explosives expert whose job is to blow up the guns of Navarone once the team gets there.
The screenplay was written by Carl Foreman, who also wrote High Noon (1952). While this film was nominated for seven Academy Awards (including Best Picture and Best Director), it won the award for Best Special Effects. This is a good one to put in the queue when you’re in the mood for an epic, old-fashioned, big-adventure military drama.
David Raether is a veteran TV writer and essayist. He worked for 12 years as a television sitcom writer/producer, including a 111-episode run on the ground-breaking ABC comedy “Roseanne.” His essays have been published by Salon.com, The Times of London, and Longforms.org, and have been lauded by The Atlantic Magazine and the BBC World Service. His memoir, Homeless: A Picaresque Memoir from Our Times, is awaiting publication.