Vintage British postcard. Art Photo, 37-I. Warner Bros. and Vitaphone Pictures, 113.
George Brent, born George Brendan Nolan (Ballinasloe, 15 March 1904,- Solana Beach, 26 May 1979) was an Irish-American actor who was mainly active in American cinema in the 1930s and 1940s. He was paired eleven times with Bette Davis, e.g. in Jezebel and Dark Victory.
Brent was born in a small village in County Roscommon, Ireland, the son of a British Army officer. By the age of 11, both parents had died and he was sent to New York to live with his aunt. He later returned to study at Dublin University. At the time of the Irish War of Independence, between 1919 and 1922, Brent was part of the IRA. In his later life, he claimed to have been active only as an errand boy for politician Michael Collins. After arriving in the United States in 1921, he took part in the tour of the theatre play Abie's Irish Rose. In the years that followed, he acted in Colorado, Rhode Island, Florida and Massachusetts, among others. In 1927, he made his Broadway debut in the play Love, Honor, and Betray opposite Clark Gable. He took up residence in Hollywood some time later to focus on a film career. He debuted with a supporting role in the film Under Suspicion (1930) for Fox Film Corporation. In 1930-31 he acted at Fox and Universal in various parts.
Brent's breakthrough followed after he signed a contract with Warner Brothers in 1931. He worked for the studio for 20 years and soon became a star in films with e.g. Ruth Chatterton (e.g. Lily Turner, 1933) and Barbara Stanwyck (Baby Face, 1933) , Jon Blondell, and Loretta Young. He was on loan to Paramount for Luxury Liner (Lothar Mendes, 1933), and to MGM for The Painted Veil (Richard Boleslawski, 1934) with Great Garbo, while at Warner's he played Bebe Daniels' lover in 42nd Street (Lloyd Bacon, 1933). He was known as the favourite antagonist of the demanding actress Bette Davis, with whom he did 11 films, including Jezebel (William Wyler, 1938), Dark Victory (Edmund Goulding, 1939), and Goulding's The Old Maid (1939) - especially the latter two were huge successes. Brent's first male-oriented film was Submarine D-1 (1937) with Pat O'Brien and others. A major part he had in the disaster movie The Rains Came (1939) by Clarence Brown. In 1937 he became an American citizen. Between 1938 and 1947 Brent also had a rich career in radio plays for Lux Radio Theater, which adapted films- in Brent's case often his own films - to radio plays.
After ten years of intense film acting at Warner's, plus loans to other majors, in 1942 Brent tried to enlist for the army but failed, became a civilian flight instructor and then a pilot in the Coast Guard during the war. After the war, Brent's star gradually sank. He was still the male star of films, including two psychological horror films: Jacques Tourneur's Experiment Perilous (1944), with Hedy Lamarr and Paul Lukas, and Robert Siodmak's The Spiral Staircase (1946), with Dorothy McGuire - the latter a very successful film at the time. Yet, in the later 1940s, Brent fell into oblivion and after appearances in numerous B-movies, he retired in 1953. He made a few more guest roles in TV series and returned to the big screen once in 1978 for a supporting role as a judge in Born Again by Irving Rapper.
During his heyday, Brent was known in Hollywood as a notorious womaniser. Besides a long-term relationship with Davis, five of his marriages are known, he married Helen Louise Campbell (1925-27), Ruth Chatterton (1932-34), Constance Worth (1937) and Ann Sheridan (1942-43). In 1947, he married model and fashion designer Janet Michaels, with whom he had two children. They remained married until her death in 1974. After a long period of illness, Brent died in 1979 of pulmonary emphysema.
Sources: Dutch and English Wikipedia, IMDb.