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In the near half-century since its premiere, FRANKENSTEIN has aged into a charming fairy tale. While the film owes its magic chiefly to the queer beauty of Karloff’s portrayal of his ‘dear old Monster” and the bravura of Whale’s direction, Colin’s Dr. Frankenstein is an enchanting performance. The actor almost wins sympathy for his quest to “be God” as he poetically muses: “Where should we be if nobody tried to find out what lies beyond? Have you never wanted to look beyond the clouds and the stars or to know what causes the trees to bud? And what changes the darkness into light?”

While audiences suffered Yuletide nightmares about Frankenstein and his Monster, Colin vacationed at his 400 year-old cottage in County Kent outside London, tending to his injured hip, motoring about the countryside, playing with his blue ribbon Sealyham terriers, and sadly drinking heavily again.

In March, ’32, Colin played opposite Gertrude Jennings in Elegant Edward at the London Palladium, and starred in British Paramount’s LILY CHRISTINE, ‘comeback’ vehicle for Corinne Griffith (who didn’t make another film for 25 years).

Back in Hollywood, Katharine Hepburn was the rage after the release of RKO’s ’32 A BILL OF DIVORCEMENT, and Colin became her leading man in her second film: RKO’s CHRISTOPHER STRONG (’33) (originally set for Ann Harding and Leslie Howard). It was s stagy melodrama, directed by Dorothy Arzner, in which Miss Hepburn, an aviatrix, kills herself after Colin, her knighted, married lover, impregnates her. He praised his co-star: ”There is nobody else quite like her in Hollywood – or anywhere else, for that matter . . . She is not just a face but a terrific personality. I said just now that she is not beautiful and that is true, though she understands the art of acting so amazingly that she car convey the illusion of beauty if the pan demands it!” CHRISTOPHER STRONG proved s box office failure, but did win its stars some very flattering notices; as the NY “Times” noted, “There is something finely natural about the acting of both Miss Hepburn and Mr. Clive.”

Colin next visited the MGM lot to play in ’33’s LOOKING FORWARD, produced by Hearst’s Cosmopolitan Pictures, The London-based drama starred Lionel Barrymore and Lewis Stone. Colin proved most attractive as magnate Stone’s secretary, in love with Elizabeth Allan. After a visit to his English retreat, Colin returned to Broadway on Oct. 28, ’33, starring in the sea melodrama, Eight Belles. The leading role was written especially for him, and it was hardly a flattering one Captain Dale, a drunken swine of a ship master murdered by his mutinous crew. It ran only 17 performances.

On the night of Dec. 26, ’33, Katharine Hepburn first announced to an NYC audience, “The calla lilies are in bloom again.” The play was The Lake, and Colin played John Clayne, her hapless bridegroom. (Actor’s Equity had first ruler that he, as a foreigner, could appear in only one NYC play per 6 months; a special concession was made when it realized his contracting could assure employment for some 26 American actors.) The play was disaster, winning Miss Hepburn Dorothy Parker’s undying canard, “She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B,” but Colin remained a champion of the actress When The Lake closed after Miss Hepburn bought up her contract after 55 performances, Colin staunchly defended he stating, “Someday she will probably be one of the leading stars of the Broadway stage.”

I recently asked Miss Hepburn about Colin and she simply replied, “I played with Colin. He was a lovely actor. I did not really know him at all.”

Colin returned to Hollywood by plane where he replaced Warren William in Warners’ THE KEY (’34), a drama of the English/Irish ”troubles,” co-starring William Powell and Edna Best. He then visited Monogram, playing Mr. Rochester to Virginia Bruce’s JANE EYRE (’34), the first talking version of Charlotte Bronte’s Gothic classic and a quite auspicious “special” from that poverty row lot. And at Universal, Colin was superb as Sir Gerald Corven, who ravages gentle wife Diana Wynyard with a riding crop in Whale’s “masterpiece,” ONE MORE RIVER (’34). While “Literary Digest” saluted Colin’s “properly savage” portrayal, the censors were less pleased. A sequence in which Colin’s Sir Gerald raped his estrange spouse was judged so shocking that the Production Code ordered the scene scissored, and Whale coyly replaced it with a scene of Miss Wynyard, post coitus, coyly regaining her composure with a cup of teal.

In ’34, Colin again played Stanhope in revival of Journey’s End on the Hollywood stage. Also, he became a contract player at Warner Bros. Studio. Settled in the Hollywood he had once so enjoyed, Colin sadly spent less time with sports and more time with bottles, destroying himself.

“In the Thirties I think everybody out here knew that Clive was brilliant,” DeWitt Bodeen recently wrote me from Hollywood, “but an alcoholic, and often unreliable.” As David Manners discovered a few years earlier, there were times when Colin could be sterling company, and Warners’ contractee Josephine Hutchinson recently told me, “Colin was a good actor and a charming man . . . It is sad that his time came in his early years.” Yet Colin appeared hellbent on hastening his own end. His great friends in the cinema colony were James Whale and liquor. Ever separated from his London-based wife, ever-upset by his bisexual nature, Colin too often sought solace at the notorious all-male parties at Whale’s Pacific Palisades villa, where two decades later, the body of the long ostracized director was found floating in the pool under mysterious, sordid circumstances. Colin’s “Hyde” nature festered in Hollywood, and there were several breakdowns. On the eve of beginning his first Warner film as a contractee, ’34’s THE FIREBIRD, he had to be replaced by Lionel Atwill. Still, his acting skills remained incisive, and in ’35, he proved himself one of the cinema’s finest character players in 7 releases.

Twentieth Century/UA’s dive of India was a spectacular biopic of Colin’s ancestor as portrayed by Ronald Colman. Colin played Captain Johnstone, Clive’s sinuous rival. It was ironic casting, since one of the actor’s most cherished possessions was a gold medal awarded his ancestor for his colonial adventures in India.

Warner Bros. recalled Colin for THE RIGHT TO LIVE, a soaper triangle involving cripple Colin, his long-suffering wife Josephine Hutchinson, and his dashing brother George Brent. “If THE RIGHT TO LIVE catches you up in the neurotic anguish of the man who loves his wife too dearly to make her share his burden,” wrote the NY “Times,” “it is because Mr. Clive succeeds so admirably in daubing his role with authentic emotions.”

“I have been cursed for delving into the mysteries of Life – perhaps Death is sacred . . . and I profaned it!” raved Colin in Universal’s BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, masterfully reprising his role of the infamous blasphemer. In Whale’s Swiftian sequel, Karloff’s Monster ran marvelously amok, laughing, weeping, smoking a cigar, drinking wine and becoming a Christ symbol; a delightful cast featured Elsa Lanchester as both a dainty Mary Shelley and a hissing Monster’s mate, Ernest Thesiger as the mincingly mad wizard Pretorius, and Una O’Connor as a screeching oracle. A stirring Franz Waxman score and grand special effects sparked what Kinematograph Weekly hailed as a “Spectacular thriller, a macabre morality play,” and Carlos Clarens’ tome An Illustrated History of the Horror Film toasts the fantasy as remaining, “along with KING KONG, Hollywood’s finest moment of unbridled imagination.” Colin suffered a fall on the set, and for a time hobbled about on a cane.

Back at Warners, Colin joined Bette Davis and Ian Hunter in THE GIRL FROM TENTH AVENUE, a soap opera saved by the acting of the star trio.

Colin next reported to MGM. How patriarchal Louis Mayer must have gaped at MAD LOVE, Karl Freund’s exotically perverse treatment of Les Mains d’Orlac. The Paris Theatre des Horreurs, where Frances Drake screams nightly on the rack to the sadistic glee of the crowds; Peter Lorre (his U.S. debut) as Dr. Gogol, of the bald pate and pet cockatoo, passionately serenading his wax statue of Miss Drake on the organ; and Colin as Orlac, ranting of his new hands (via Gogol’s surgery) “They feel for knives. They want to kill!”; all played a grotesque part in what “Time” labeled as “one of the most completely horrible stories of the year.” Over the decades, the film has reaped a “cult” following; in fact, in her tome, The Citizen Kane Book, Pauline Kael accused Orson Welles of copying MAD LOVE in his creation of CITIZEN KANE.

There followed a loan-out to the new 20th C-F studio for the frothy THE MAN WHO BROKE THE BANK AT MONTE CARLO. Suave Ronald Colman again was the blithely dapper hero, blonde Joan Bennett the girl hired to lure him back to the casino after his first coup, and scowling Colin her wicked accomplice.

Colin’s Warner pact finally expired in that lot’s THE WIDOW FROM MONTE CARLO, in which he played the glaring fiancé of a sacredly photographed Dolores Del Rio. Fleeing Hollywood, he sought professional and private rejuvenation on the Broadway stage, where he found it in Libel!, which opened Dec. 20, ’35. In this courtroom thriller directed by Otto Preminger, Colin played Sir Mark Loddon, a shell-shocked amnesia victim. The role was enormously challenging; he was on stage every minute of the play, playing one act totally speechless, conveying his anguish only by gesture and facial expression. “It’s like a holiday.” rejoiced Colin of the hit play, “like returning to one’s first love.”

Early in March, ’36, the company of Libel! celebrated its 100th performance since its Philadelphia opening. Colin, who had admirably controlled his drinking, joined the cast in a champagne party. It was a tragic mistake. Early in the evening of March 11, ’36, the staff of the Algonquin Hotel had to break down the door of the actor’s suite, where Colin was hysterical with delirium tremens. He was rushed to Harbor Sanitarium, where a minor operation was performed. The producers of Libel! put Colin’s understudy Colin Hunter into action, and promised the star’s return within a week.

He never returned. Colin contracted pneumonia and Libel! closed without its leading player. Deeply unhappy, Colin spent most of ’36 ill and alone in his Algonquin suite, squelching his recovery by near-suicidal drinking and developing pulmonary tuberculosis. Finally, late that year, he took a plane to Hollywood, where he acted in his two final films.

HISTORY IS MADE AT NIGHT (UA, ’37) was a grand romance/comedy/melodrama, capped by an awesome shipwreck and directed with flair by Frank Borzage. Charges Boyer and Jean Arthur were charming as the lovers, Leo Carrillo was richly comic, and Colin was perversity incarnate as the insane Bruce Vail, whose mad jealousy drives his wife to a lover and himself to murder and suicide. Colin is flawlessly spiteful as he sadistically taunts spouse Arthur in their ship cabin about the lover he suspects she’s protecting: “Wouldn’t it be wonderful, Irene, if you were a magician and could change me into him? Just think – you two alone, right now, in this room, on this boat, in the middle of the sea. What would you give, Irene?” To which Miss Arthur gushes, “I’d give my soul!”

While playing this role, Colin was ill, physically and emotionally; clearly he felt the severity of his own personal tragedy. Playing one dramatic scene, Colin shocked the cast by bursting suddenly into hysterical sobs. Yet still he repulsed the concern of his co-workers, and refused advice to seek proper care.

His final release was RKO’s THE WOMAN I LOVE (’37), an inferior remake of the French ’35 L’EQUIPAGE. Colin played a Captain of the Lafayette Escadrille. The set was miserable. Stars Paul Muni and Miriam Hopkins despised each other, and director Anatole Litvak (who became Miss Hopkins’ third husband later that year) was impotent to harness the temperament. At times it appeared that the film would never be completed due to these clashes, and Colin found his usual escape from the trauma. (In April, ’37, Colin played with Miss Hopkins in a “Campbell’s Soup” radio version of the aviation yarn.)

Colin rapidly decayed after these engagements. In June of ’37, the pale, skeletal actor entered Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Hollywood. For a week reporters hovered about the hospital, relating he was “near death” from a heart ailment, tuberculosis, and pneumonia, and keeping vigil for the expected arrival of Jeanne de Casahis from London. She never arrived. At 10:05 a.m. on Friday, June 25, 1937, with only hospital staff at his bedside, Colin Clive died. The official hospital synonym for drinking oneself to death was “intestinal and pulmonary ailments.”

While associates sought survivors who still loved Colin enough to authorize final burial arrangements, the actor’s body lay for three days on a funeral bed at the Edwards Bros. Colonial Mortuary on Venice Boulevard. The florid morgue opened its doors to the public, who lined up like children at a Saturday matinee to see the star who had reached so sad a journey’s end. Following Episcopal services on June 29, ’37, the Rosedale Crematory cremated the body.

A little more than a year after Colin’s demise, Universal began production of a third Monster saga, ’39’s SON OF FRANKENSTEIN. Early in the film, Basil Rathbone, as the blasphemer’s son “Wolf,” stands before a striking, full-length oil portrait of Colin, and reads his “father’s” will words strangely reminiscent of Colin Clive’s own tragic life:

“My son … Even though the path is cruel and torturous, carry on . . . maybe where I have failed, you will succeed. You have inherited the fortune of the Frankensteins. I trust you will not inherit their fate.”

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