He was the recipient of numerous accolades, including four Academy Award nominations for Best Supporting Actor, and is considered one of the screen's great character stars who played cultured villains during the Golden Age of Hollywood.

He moved to the United States in the late 1920s and became a successful Broadway star, before making his American film debut in Dr. Jack Griffin in The Invisible Man (1933).

He went on to play prominent roles in such big screen production as The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), The Wolf Man (1941), Casablanca (1942), Kings Row (1942), Phantom of the Opera (1943) and Notorious (1946).

He continued to work as a prominent character actor in films, notably as Mr. Dryden in Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and his final role in the Biblical epic The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965).

[3] Richard Chamberlain described him as "one of the finest actors of the 20th century," while Bette Davis considered him one of her favorite co-stars.

Rains made his stage debut at age 10 in the play Sweet Nell of Old Drury at the Haymarket Theatre, so that he could run around onstage as part of the production.

However, at the outbreak of World War I in 1914, he returned to England to serve in the London Scottish Regiment,[8] alongside fellow actors Basil Rathbone, Ronald Colman, Herbert Marshall and Cedric Hardwicke.

[9] In November 1916, Rains was involved in a gas attack at Vimy, which resulted in his permanently losing 90 percent of the vision in his right eye as well as suffering vocal cord damage.

[10] He never returned to combat but continued to serve with the Transport Workers Battalion of the Bedfordshire Regiment, in which he was commissioned as a temporary lieutenant on 9 May 1917.

These talents were recognised by Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, the founder of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

Tree told Rains that in order to succeed as an actor, he would have to get rid of his Cockney accent and speech impediment.

Stocky but handsome, Rains had broad shoulders and a mop of thick brown hair which he brushed over one eye.

I was always trying to copy him in my first years as an actor, until I decided to imitate Noël Coward instead.In London theatre, he achieved success in the title role of John Drinkwater's play Ulysses S. Grant, the follow-up to the same playwright's Abraham Lincoln.

Rains portrayed Faulkland in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The Rivals, presented at London's Lyric Theatre in 1925.

He returned to New York City in 1927 and appeared in nearly 20 Broadway roles, in plays which included George Bernard Shaw's The Apple Cart and dramatisations of The Constant Nymph and Pearl S. Buck's novel The Good Earth (as a Chinese farmer).

Although he had played the single supporting role in the silent, Build Thy House (1920),[2] Rains came relatively late to film acting.

[7][16] His agent, Harold Freedman, was a family friend of Carl Laemmle, who controlled Universal Pictures at the time, and had been acquainted with Rains in London and was keen to cast him in the role.

"[20] On loan to Columbia Pictures, he portrayed a corrupt but honourable U.S. senator in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), for which he received his first Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actor.

For Warner Bros., he played Dr. Alexander Tower, who commits murder-suicide to spare his daughter a life of insanity in Kings Row (1942) and the cynical police chief Captain Louis Renault in Casablanca (also 1942).

In her 1987 memoir, This 'N That, Bette Davis stated that Rains (with whom she shared the screen four times in Juarez; Now, Voyager; Mr. Skeffington; and Deception) was her favorite co-star.

Shaw apparently chose him for the part, although Rains intensely disliked Gabriel Pascal, the film's director and producer.

[22] Rains followed it with Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious (1946) as a refugee Nazi agent opposite Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman.

Two of his late screen roles were as Dryden, a cynical British diplomat in Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and King Herod in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), his last film.

In CBS's Rawhide, he portrayed Alexander Langford, an attorney in a ghost town, in the episode "Incident of Judgement Day" (1963).

During a stage and film career that spanned six decades, Rains encompassed some of the most memorable and exciting characters ever created by an actor.

Reminiscing about his work with Rains, Chamberlain said: He was in his seventies then and in failing health, yet he was charming and totally professional on the set.

[28] Here, he became a "gentleman farmer" and could relax and enjoy farming life with his then wife (Frances) churning the butter, their daughter collecting the eggs, with Rains himself ploughing the fields and cultivating the vegetable garden.

[30] In his final years, he decided to write his memoirs and engaged the help of journalist Jonathan Root to assist him.

Also included in the auction were many volumes of his private leather-bound scrapbooks which contained many of his press cuttings and reviews from the beginning of his career.