Paul Lukas

Alfred Hitchcock's delightful suspenser "The Lady Vanishes" (1938) found Lukas playing an outright, though still sneaky, villain, and he played a number of unsympathetic roles in wartime films, memorably as Hedy Lamarr's dangerous husband in "Experiment Perilous" (1944). The most notably exception to Lukas's roles during this period was his fine Oscar-winning lead performance (recreating his stage role) as a heroic resistance fighter in the well-intentioned but stodgy "Watch on the Rhine" (1943). During his later years Lukas played a number of gentler roles, keeping busy in "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" (1954, as Prof. Aronnax) and "Tender Is the Night" (1962), but the gentlemanly if sometimes deceptive Continental suavity which was always his trademark never left him.