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Ray Milland was born Reginald Alfred John Truscott-Jones in Wales in 1905. He spent 3 years as a guardsman with the Royal Household Cavalry in London, and then started appearing in English movies in 1928. He moved to Hollywood the following year and he had little success for several years, but after around five years, he found his niche playing the younger brother or the rival to the male lead. In the middle 1930s he started getting leads in romantic comedies or dramas to the type of leading ladies who did not want too strong of a male co-star! It seemed like his career would never get better than this, but in 1944 he surprised everyone with his very strong performance in Fritz Lang's Ministry of Fear, and the following year he got even more positive reviews for his role as the alcoholic writer in Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend, for which he won the Best Actor Oscar. In 1954, when Milland was pushing 50, he was offered the role of the duplicitous husband in Alfred Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder, and he gave one of the best performances of his career. But roles started drying up for the aging balding leading man, and he started taking many TV roles. He also took the lead roles in some truly dreadful low budget horror movies (including The Thing with Two Heads, where he played a rich white racist who had to spend the entire movie tied into a ridiculous body suit with giant black pro football player Rosey Grier!), although he did make a strong appearance as the father in Love Story, and he guest starred in two memorable Columbo episodes. Milland was a really first-rate actor, and when he had an important role for a top level director he proved he was as good as anyone, but sadly much of his career was spent on minor roles or in very minor movies. He passed away in 1986 at the age of 79.

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Important Added Info: Note that starting in the very early 1910s (around 1912, when studios realized that people were more likely to go to a movie if it had a star they liked in it), studios created sets of special "personality" posters, which theaters that showed their movies could hang in their lobbies. These had a big advantage over posters for specific movies, because they could be used whenever a movie with that star was shown, which meant they could be used over and over! Because studios realized this, they made these posters on a high quality paper stock, sometimes with a "linen" texture, and sometimes with elaborate border designs, and almost always with great quality color printing. They almost always measured exactly 22" x 28", the same as "half-sheets" (which were then known as "displays", except that they were taller than they were wide, and that the images almost always had a "full bleed", meaning that there were no blank borders. They almost always showed a head and shoulders image of the star, and the image on these posters is often very close to actual life-size! They almost always have the name of the star and the studio they worked for at the bottom. Even though there were many sets of these from many studios over a period of approximately 30 years (they were rarely made after the early 1940s), very few survive, likely partially due to World War II paper drives, and partially due to the fact that they were never folded and the paper they were made of sometimes aged poorly. We at eMoviePoster.com were just consigned a very special collection of 99 of these "personality" posters, which we are auctioning in separate auctions. They were collected starting in the mid 1980s, and the collector who assembled this collection tried to "upgrade" condition whenever possible over the years, so many of them are in excellent condition (sometimes likely the best surviving example), and on the ones where they are in lesser condition, it is because the collector never could find one in better condition! Now he has consigned them to us, and they will find new owners. If they were kept together, they would surely make an incredible display for the walls of any place where lots of people gather, like a museum, a restaurant, or any similar place. Of course, it is more likely that these will find many, many separate new homes, but we hope that they end up publicly displayed wherever they end up!

Note that Paramount Pictures became the leading Hollywood studio in the late 1910s, and remained at the forefront of Hollywood for the next several decades. They had a great lineup of stars, and they created many sets of personality posters to promote them. The earliest of these is likely from the late 1910s, and there are others from each succeeding decade, and there are even some that are from the late 1940s or early 1950s, which is after most of the other studios quit making these 22x28 posters. You can tell their different sets in two ways. One is that all of the posters from a set have the same border design and the stars and studio names are written in the same font and layout. The other is that you can look at the age of the star in the image (although that might possibly be deceptive, because they might have sometimes used a slightly younger version of a star!). We don't know how often the Paramount sets were made, but some major stars carried over from set to set, but with the passing years, some stars would be dropped and new stars added. These posters are extremely rare as it is likely few theaters ordered them, and fewer still saved them, and in addition, they could be easily torn, and if they were not stored carefully, they would become fragile, and it is likely many were damaged and discarded for that reason! Note that the high quality paper stock these posters were printed on does not always age very well, and can become fragile (usually resulting in chips around the edges of the poster). Because of their fragile nature and their age, we intend to send all of these personality posters in large flat packages, and never roll them into tubes (unless the buyer insists)! PLEASE DO NOT BID ON THIS POSTER, UNLESS YOU ARE WILLING TO PAY THE COST OF SHIPPING IT IN A LARGE FLAT PACKAGE!

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