Actor who had the stars but not the moon

means nothing to you. In his heyday he was associated with a particular

kind of role -- the gallant, buttoned-up, very correct continental

lover, never drunk, never grubby, always courteous, and generally a

loser.

Henreid's apotheosis was in the era of such soft-lit doomed romances,

the thirties and early forties. Like so much else, the genre collapsed

in the rubble of the Second World War and the latest role that Henreid

played set his career on terminal decline.

You may not know Henreid's name, but you would certainly recognise his

face. He played Victor Laszlo, the white-suited Czech resistance leader

in Casablanca, Ingrid Bergman's Mr Reliable -- though her love was for

the rough-hewn Rick, the inimitable Humphrey Bogart. And in the film he

had just completed, the Bette Davis vehicle, The Voyager, he filled a

very similar persona, in love with the She-Cat herself, still noble but

sensual. The recurring motif in that film, when he lights two cigarettes

and passes one to her as they exchange looks of inchoate longing, is one

of the most memorable images in cinema.

Paul George Julius von Henreid was Austrian. He was born in Trieste,

then part of the Habsburg empire, a world now so grandiloquent and

Ruritanian it seems fantastically beyond living memory. The von Henreids

were an aristocratic banking clan, and very rich. After the Great War

their fortunes faded. The young Paul began adult life in publishing, but

was set on an acting career. In 1933 he was recruited to the Max

Reinhardt acting school and began to win parts as a leading man. His

first film was the Austrian production Jersey Lilly (1935) and in 1937

head-hunted Henreid went to England to play Prince Albert in Victoria

The Great, starring Anna Neagle.

Like so many others, Henreid was now ensnared in international

politics. He was an outspoken anti-Nazi and already prominent; when

Hitler took over Austria in 1938 return home was impossible. Yet, at the

onset of war, Henreid was threatened with deportation, and saved only by

the intervention of well-connected actors.

In 1940 he played a big part in Carol Reed's Night Train, one of the

greatest spy films ever shot. This made him known across America. He was

invited to reprise a part on the Broadway stage, and duly sailed. He

would live in the States for the rest of his life. Though the stage plan

fell through, Henreid was seized by RKO and cast as the hero in Joan of

Paris (1942), a gripping resistance picture where he played a downed

pilot. The movie made some impact. And Warner producer Hal Wallis now

found his leading man for a new project.

Wallis was preparing an adaptation of a best-selling novel, Now,

Voyager, by Olive Higgins Prouty. Bette Davis would play the heroine

Charlotte Vale, a plump and dowdy spinster repressed by her rich and

frightful mother, who -- after psychotherapy, a diet and complete

makeover -- would emerge as a poised and beautiful woman set for poised

and beautiful love.

By 1942 Bette Davis was at the zenith of her career and a formidable

screen personality; Wallis needed an actor strong enough to hold his own

beside her and who could epitomise screen romance. Henreid was ideal.

On paper, I am afraid, the plot of Now, Voyager reads like high-class

soap. Duly shrunk, slimmed and made over, Charlotte Vale is kept safely

away from her mother, Gladys Cooper, by being dispatched on an ocean

cruise with a ravishing wardrobe. On board she meets Jerry Durrantz

(Henreid), a gentle, but intensely romantic architect.

Friendship blossoms; after a ridiculous road accident in Rio, the two

are compelled to spend the night together in a convenient shack while

awaiting rescue. Untold hours of passion are coyly suggested by a very

large rug and a very bright fire. Vale returns home to face -- and

triumph over -- the tyrannical parent. Durrantz returns to her life, and

she breaks off reluctant engagement to a rich but dull pillock. But the

lovers' star is crossed. He cannot leave his wife, for this is 1942, and

there are censors to stop that sort of thing. They agree. They sigh.

They make eyes. He lights cigarettes. They inhale, and sigh once more,

and she says: ''Let's not ask for the moon. We have the stars . . .''

The End.

Pure schlock. But such is the skill of direction, the calibre of the

acting, and the throbbing tears of Max Steiner's musical score, Now,

Voyager, still keeps the Kleenex industry buoyant with every passing

year. Warner followed the film with Casablanca (1942) -- so rapidly that

the two pictures even share a railway-station set.

Henreid hesitated to take the role of Victor Laszlo. He feared --

correctly -- that the glory would go to Bogart and demanded that the

character be strengthened in the script. And Henreid duly turned in one

of his best performances, aided (like many of that memorable cast) by

his close emotional involvement in the material.

He, too, loathed the Third Reich; he, too, was an exile. And one of

the picture's finest moments -- when, enraged by raucous German soldiers

singing Macht am Rhein, Laszlo storms down to lead orchestra and all

assembled in impassioned rendition of the Marseillaise -- depicts him at

his greatest.

But, before the band will raise instruments to play at his behest,

they all glance at Bogart's Rick. And only on his nod do they proceed.

Even here, Henreid is upstaged.

He made some good films after Casablanca, but the momentum of Joan of

Paris and Now, Voyager had been irretrievably lost. Henreid now shared a

contract between two movie factories, Warner and RKO, and neither would

''puff'' him for fear of advantage to the other. He took various parts

in various pictures, all disappointments; his 1947 reunion with Bette

Davis -- in Deception, where he played a cellist -- was one of her

poorer films. By the fifties Henreid could only obtain supporting roles.

By the sixties he was directing and producing. His last screen

appearance was in the truly awful Exorcist II: The Heretic, probably the

worst movie ever made.

Henreid was a victim of that artistic curse, typecasting. He became

linked, too soon and too firmly, with a particular screen mould, and was

never able to break out of it, and went down with the role of correct

and proper continental lovers when correct and proper continental lovers

went out of fashion. After 1945 the public demanded realism, grittiness.

And it was not Henreid who became a universal icon of manhood: it was

Humphrey Bogart. Tuxedos were out. Trenchcoats were in.

In retirement, Henreid lived quietly in America. He occasionally

attended fan-club gatherings, telling stories of Casablanca's

production, doing his two-cigarette trick. Like the era of his birth,

the time of his glory had long vanished. He abides today in the seamless

place of that world: satin monochrome, swelling music, and lovely

innocents, where no-one ever caught lung cancer, where we had the stars

if not the moon.

John Macleod is Scottish Young Journalist of the Year.