Call him one of the movies' foremost "forgotten" men. Ray Milland, our TCM Star of the Month for April, isn't a name one ever hears mentioned today when people talk about the giants of Hollywood's glory days as a filmmaking center but he did in fact have one of the great movieland careers, especially during a 22-year stretch when he was under contract to Paramount studios and was one of that company's proudest assets. No wonder. Milland had all the prerequisites. He was handsome, affable, talented and extremely likeable, with an ever-present twinkle in his eyes, also possessing an "everyman" quality which made him easy to cast.

He fit ever so smoothly into all movie genres, be it a romantic comedy (such as the TCM premiere of Everything Happens at Night), a big-scale adventure film (DeMille's Reap the Wild Wind), ghost stories (The Uninvited), musical-dramas (Lady in the Dark), Technicolored westerns (California), lavish costumers (Kitty), cat-and-mouse mystery thrillers (The Big Clock), air epics (I Wanted Wings), heart-tuggers (Close to My Heart) or tropical island capers in which it was necessary to save Dorothy Lamour from crocodiles and exploding volcanos, something Milland was called on to do numerous times.

During his career there were many high points but one particular slam dunk: Billy Wilder's stark 1945 exploration of a harrowing three days in the life of an alcoholic, The Lost Weekend. It was the most challenging role Milland was ever assigned and one which brought him the year's Best Actor Academy Award. At that point, the world was his oyster. Everybody knew him. Everybody liked him. And he never stopped working, soon branching out to become a director as well.

But that's when one of those woozy Hollywood things happened which defy logic. While still very much in plain sight, Milland began to evaporate from the public's consciousness. Like many an actor who had charmed and delighted the world in earlier times, Milland, approaching 50 years old, lost the focus and interest of both filmmakers and the public. Age and the era of Clift, Brando and Dean changed everything.

On rare occasions a terrific film role would still come Milland's way, as with Hitchcock's 1954 thriller Dial M for Murder; he also kept busy with two affable TV series in the 1950s, Meet Mr. McNulty and Markham, but the focus on him by then had blurred. In 1970, there was one last great hurrah when he played Ryan O'Neal's wealthy papa in the phenomenally successful Love Story but by then most of the titles on his credit sheet ran along the lines of X: The Man with X-Ray Eyes and The Thing with Two Heads. Did it make him bitter? Yes, it did. In later years, that twinkle was long gone from his eyes and, by his own admission, he was angry about many things: the changing times, growing older, the lack of interest in him and his work, the death of a son and other factors.

This month on TCM we warmly remember Ray Milland in happier times. We'll be showing 30 of his films, several of them TCM premieres, his Millandia charm and twinkle very much in evidence, offering ample proof of why the public initially fell in love with him and adding to he isn't better remembered by lovers today.

by Robert Osborne