LYCOS RETRIEVER 
James Mason: Stars
built 658 days ago
James Mason has been the creative force behind Star of Indiana since the group's founding in the fall of 1984. A lifelong veteran of drum and bugle corps and other musical activities, Mason marched in a World Championship corps, then directed Star of Indiana to the World Championship title in 1991.
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James Mason spent a few years on the stage before turning in the late 1930s to the screen. He appeared in a series of quota films in which his dark, somewhat sinister good looks qualified him as a type of ruthless but romantic villain. He was seen in such bravura romances as The Man in Grey, The Seventh Veil, and The Wicked Lady, successful at the box office and distinguished chiefly for his star quality. Apart from a supporting role in Thunder Rock, his first important film was Carol Reed's Odd Man Out. As Johnny, the Irish partisan being hunted through the streets of Belfast by both the police and by those seeking to aid him, he achieved the feat of playing a leading character who is mute through much of the action, an odyssey of fear and terror spanning some 24 hours.
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Mason's first commercial success came in 1943 with The Man in Grey, a swashbuckling Regency romance, with Mason as the ruthless-but-sexy aristocratic villain. He loathed making what he regarded as lowbrow rubbish, even hitting the director at one point during the filming in pure frustration. But whether Mason liked it or not the film was a hit, and he was a star.
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Rather than immediately going to Hollywood... Mason remained in England. Revealing that he could be more than just brutal leading men in weepy potboilers, he added an artistic as well as popular triumph to his credits with Carol Reed's Odd Man Out (1947). Starring Mason as a doomed IRA leader hunted by the police, Odd Man Out garnered international raves, and he often cited it as his favorite among his many films.
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Mason's return to the theatre was not entirely successful. Although audiences and the rest of the cast were supportive, the reviews were lukewarm and the general opinion - eventually shared by Mason himself - was that he did not have the power in his voice or the sheer size in his performance to be a theatre star.
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