Robert Donat
1905 – 1958 · aged 53
English actor (1905–1958)
- Born
- 18 Mar 1905 · Withington
- Died
- 9 Jun 1958 · London
Life timeline
Their life from birth to death. On the timeline, world events of the time are shown faintly.
- 18 Mar 1905BornBorn in Withington
- 1940AwardAcademy Award for Best Actor
- 9 Jun 1958DiedDied in London
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Meanwhile in the world
Major world events during their lifetime (1905 – 1958).
- 1914 – 1918World War I
- 1915 – 1923Armenian genocide
- 1917Balfour Declaration
- 1917February Revolution
- 1917October Revolution
- 1917 – 1922Russian Civil War
- 1919 – 1920Paris Peace Conference
- 1920Treaty of Versailles
- 1933 – 1945The Holocaust
- 19341934 FIFA World Cup
- 19361936 Summer Olympics
- 1937 – 1945Second Sino-Japanese War
- 19381938 FIFA World Cup
- 1938Munich Agreement
- 1939 – 1940Winter War
- 1939 – 1945World War II
- 1940 – 1945Auschwitz concentration camp
- 1941Attack on Pearl Harbor
- 1941 – 1945Eastern Front
- 1941Operation Barbarossa
- 1942 – 1943Battle of Stalingrad
- 1945Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
- 1945 – 1946Nuremberg trials
- 19501950 FIFA World Cup
- 1950 – 1953Korean War
- 1953 – 1959Cuban Revolution
- 19541954 FIFA World Cup
- 1955 – 1975Vietnam War
- 1956Hungarian Revolution of 1956
- 1956Suez Crisis
- 19581958 FIFA World Cup
Biography
Friedrich Robert Donat ( DOH-nat; 18 March 1905 – 9 June 1958) was an English actor. Making his breakthrough film role in Alexander Korda's The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), today he is best remembered for his roles in The Count of Monte Cristo (1934), Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (1935), and Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor as the gentle English schoolmaster Mr. Chips.
Beginning his career in theatre, Donat made his stage debut in 1921 playing Lucius in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, and in 1928 he appeared in productions at the Liverpool Playhouse, starring in plays by John Galsworthy, George Bernard Shaw among others, before moving to London in 1930. He appeared in the West End when he starred in A Sleeping Clergyman in 1933, and in 1936 he took on the management of the West End's Queen's Theatre.
In his book, The Age of the Dream Palace, Jeffrey Richards wrote that Donat was "British cinema's one undisputed romantic leading man in the 1930s". "The image he projected was that of the romantic idealist, often with a dash of the gentleman adventurer."
Donat suffered from chronic asthma, which affected his career and limited him to appearing in only 19 films.
Text from the Wikipedia article Robert Donat, CC BY-SA 4.0
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