Want to know the best Ronald Colman movies? How about the worst Ronald Colman movies? Curious about Ronald Colman’s box office grosses or which Ronald Colman movie picked up the most Oscar® nominations? Need to know which Ronald Colman movie got the best reviews from critics and audiences and which got the worst reviews? Well you have come to the right place….because we have all of that information.
Ronald Colman (1891-1958) was an English Oscar® winning actor who was a major star from the 1920s to the 1940s. Colman was one of the few top silent actors to become an even bigger “talkie” star. His IMDb page shows 62 acting credits from 1917-1957. This page ranks 36 Ronald Colman movies from Best to Worst in six different sortable columns of information. Television shows, shorts, cameos, and some of his silent movies were not included in the rankings.
Drivel part of the page: This Colman page was a fairly new request from Laurent. So how did it get to the top of the requests? Well….part of our movie research involves going to not so close libraries. Our last trip to the College of William and Mary’s library ended up with us borrowing 13 movie books. Well we are heading back there in a couple of weeks….so those books will be going back. Since we are about to lose those books…those book subjects need their UMR (Ultimate Movie Rankings) movie pages to be finished. So that meant we had to research and publish this Ronald Colman page. It also means Søren and Flora‘s request for Joan Fontaine will be coming soon.
Ronald Colman Movies Can Be Ranked 6 Ways In This Table
The really cool thing about this table is that it is “user-sortable”. Rank the movies anyway you want.
- Sort Ronald Colman movies by co-stars of his movies.
- Sort Ronald Colman movies by adjusted domestic box office grosses using current movie ticket cost (in millions)
- Sort Ronald Colman movies by domestic yearly box office rank
- Sort Ronald Colman movies how they were received by critics and audiences. 60% rating or higher should indicate a good movie.
- Sort by how many Oscar® nominations each Ronald Colman movie received and how many Oscar® wins each Ronald Colman movie won.
- Sort Ronald Colman movies by Ultimate Movie Rankings (UMR) Score. UMR Score puts box office, reviews and awards into a mathematical equation and gives each movie a score.
Stats and Possibly Interesting Things From The Above Ronald Colmanl Table
- Nineteen Ronald Colman movies crossed the magical $100 million domestic gross mark. That is a percentage of 52.78% of his movies listed. Random Harvest (1942) was his biggest box office hit.
- An average Ronald Colman movie grossed $111.20 million in adjusted box office gross.
- Using RottenTomatoes.com’s 60% fresh meter. 29 Ronald Colman movies are rated as good movies…or 80.55% of his movies. Random Harvest (1942) is his highest rated movie while The Story of Mankind (1957) is his lowest rated movie.
- Thirteen Ronald Colman movies received at least one Oscar® nomination in any category…..or 36.11% of his movies.
- Two Ronald Colman movie won at least one Oscar® in any category…..or 5.55% of his movies.
- An average Ultimate Movie Rankings (UMR) Score is 39.86. 29 Ronald Colman movies scored higher that average….or 80.55 of his movies. Random Harvest (1942) got the the highest UMR Score while The Story of Mankind (1957) got the lowest UMR Score.
Possibly Interesting Facts About Ronald Colman
1. Ronald Charles Colman was born in Richmond, Surrey, England in 1891.
2. Ronald Colman joined the London Scottish Regiment and was seriously wounded while serving at the Western Front during World War I. The injury to his ankle resulted in a life long limp that Colman tried hide throughout the rest of his acting career. Other actors that saw service with the London Scottish Regiment during World War 1 included: Claude Rains, Herbert Marshall, Cedric Hardwicke and Basil Rathbone.
3. Ronald Colman’s path to stardom: 1. Made professional stage in 1914. 2. Appeared in a few English silent films from 1917 to 1919. 3. Headed to America in 1920. 4. Appeared in a few Hollywood silent films in 1920 and 1923. 5. Lillian Gish requested Colman for her 1923 movie The White Sister. 6. Colman became of the biggest silent movie stars from 1923 to 1928. 7. Talkies arrived…and Coleman’s voice helped him become an even bigger star in the 1930s and 1940s.
4. Ronald Colman was nominated for 4 Academy Awards®: 1929’s Bulldog Drummond, 1929’s Condemned, 1942’s Random Harvest and 1947’s A Double Life. He won the Best Actor Oscar® for A Double Life
5. Ronald Colman got nominated and won 1 Golden Globe® award: 1947’s A Double Life.
6. Ronald Colman was married 2 times. His first marriage was Thelma Raye from 1920 to 1934. His second marriage was to Benita Hume from 1938 until his death in 1958. They had one daughter, Juliet Benita Colman.
7. Ronald Colman appeared in dual roles many times throughout his career. The most famous: If I Were King (1938), Random Harvest (1942), A Double Life (1947) and The Prisoner of Zenda (1937).
8. Check out Ronald Colman‘s career compared to current and classic actors. Most 100 Million Dollar Movies of All-Time.
Want more stats? Well here are adjusted worldwide box office grosses on 8 Ronald Colman Movies
- Bulldog Drummond (1929) $120.30 million adjusted worldwide gross
- Kismet (1944) $334.30 million adjusted worldwide gross
- Lucky Partners (1940) $119.70 million adjusted worldwide gross
- My Life With Caroline (1941) $81.50 million adjusted worldwide gross
- Random Harvest (1942) $678.50 million adjusted worldwide gross
- The Story of Mankind (1957) $17.50 million adjusted worldwide gross
- A Tale Of Two Cities, A (1935) $230.50 million adjusted worldwide gross
- The Talk of the Town, The (1942) $126.40 million adjusted worldwide gross
Academy Award® and Oscar® are the registered trademarks of the Academy of Motion Arts and Sciences. Golden Globe® is a registered trademark of the Hollywood Foreign Press.
For comments….all you need is a name and a comment….please ignore the rest.
1 You and Bruce agree on all Top 5 of Ronald’s films but in a different order. Random Harvest has always been my most liked Colman film so I agree with Bruce in making it No 1 but I agree with you when you list Tale of Two Cities and Prisoner of Zenda as No 2 and 3 respectively. However we must remember that with Grant in Talk of the Town it is simply not in The Supremo’s DNA to mark that down to 5th as you have courageously done.
2 I missed your stills in the Anthony Mann video but directors do not generate stills the way actors do and in the latter respect I’ve nothing to complain about in the Colman video as there are stunners of Ronnie and Dietrich in Kismet, ,him and Doug Jr in Prisoner of Zenda and Ronnie with Greer Garson in Random Harvest
3 Lovey posters too from the 2 Bulldog Drummond films, Clive of India and Kismet. I see in your poster for the latter movie Marlene does not get even equal billing to Ronnie so maybe John could talk us through that anomaly.
4 It was nice to see Ronnie’s silent films Stella Dallas and Winning of Barbara Worth included. I cannot paraphrase Ronnie from Tale of Two Cities and say to you your Colman video is “A far, far better thing you do now than anything you’ve ever done.” but it’s up AMONG your best so 9.4/10
PS If you are interested in how your new nickname was born please see my post of today to The Creator about Dana Andrews. I was surprised that His Highness credited Best Years of our Lives to Dana’s grosses as he gave so much of it away to Myrna Loy and Virginia Mayo that I’d have though there would be nothing of it left for anyone else!
Hi Bob, glad you liked the video despite your favorite not being no.1, Random Harvest just wasn’t in the same league as the 3 others I had up there. I mean if Lost Horizon, Zenda, Two Cities or Random Harvest were on TV, same time, different channels, would you really sit through a romantic drama instead? of course you wouldn’t.
Anyway looking at my score chart Random Harvest was the only one of the top 5 not to receive 10 out of 10, Talk of the Town did would you believe. And the top 3 received multiple 10 out of 10s.
Thanks as always for the review and rating, always appreciated.
Hey Steve…I think some our differences might be that I give a little more percentage to audiences than you do. For instance Rotten Tomatoes Audience score is in my rating…depending on the movie the audience reviews are almost the same weight as the critic reviews. Just a thought. I think we are very close in this example…which is normally the case..with a movie here to these that are way off. Good video as always.
🙂
BRUCE
1 As part answer to your question one anthology of movies reckons Story of Mankind is one of the 50 worst movies ever made.
2 It may help you appreciate how bad it was when you consider that Harpo Marx played Sir Asaac Newton, regarded as one of the greatest scientists of all time, Peter Lorre was the Emperor Nero, Hedy Lamarr was Joan of Arc and Ronnie was The Spirit of Mankind. Although it was the final outing for the Marx boys. among others, the Brothers are never seen together in the film.
3 There were so many ‘has-beens in it that I’ll bet A C Lyles wishes he had made it ! It always struck me as puzzling that Colman who had hardly put a foot wrong in his heyday career chose this clinker to bow out in.
4 Because of your forte you probably should see it out of curiosity but if you were just a ‘normal’ moviegoer I would advise you to give it a miss. It was stuck on the bottom half of a double bill here in Belfast and your own adjusted abysmal gross and low critic/audience rating explains why.
Hey Bob….(1) Still I am now real curious to see that one….kind of the way I felt about Plan Nine From Outer Space….lol. (2) Sounds like interesting casting to me…lol. (3) Colman must have liked the idea…he turned down Bridge Over The River Kwai to make this one. (4) I will keep an eye open for it. Thanks for the information on The Story of Mankind.
Cogerson
The Story of Mankind is available on you tube,
but BEWARE
1 The coming of sound ruined may careers as often personas of the silent movies era proved incompatible with the voices that audiences were hearing for the first time. However Ronald Colman exemplified the adage that “Cometh the hour cometh the man,” for as Bruce has suggested the sound system simply loved Ronald’s voice and he was the ideal man for films like A Tale of Two Cities and The Prisoner of Zenda that required a good vocal delivery for maximum effect. No mumbling there Stevie! So he moved seamlessly from silent to sound films
2 His successes lasted into the 1940s but after A Double Life in 1947 for which he won an Oscar Ronald’s movie career was effectively over as he made just two more movies, Champagne for Caesar in 1950 which was highly praised but did little at the box office and the disastrous Story of Mankind in 1957. It is sad that legends such as Ronald and The Marx Bros bowed out in this clinker and that it was the beautiful Hedy Lamarr’s penultimate film. This page is a worthy tribute to an actor who as is explained in Possibly Interesting Facts above was a great silent star who also became one of the most important stars of the first two talkies decades so I welcome its update. Well done Bruce and I’ve seen the interesting exchanges between you and John on Ronnie’s WW grosses. Indeed here we have one of those rare things that you, John AND I all agree upon – the great quality of Ronnie’s vocal delivery !
Hey Bob. Yep his voice made his transition to sound movies one of the smoothest of all. I am starting to get real curious about The Story of Mankind….just how bad is it? That cast wasted? Vincent Price as the devil? I think I need to watch it. Colman’s swan song has a nifty 4.9 rating.
You are right about his career. His Oscar winning role in a Double Life was pretty much the end of his career. I wonder if even thought that on the night he won his Oscar…or did he have an idea and really appreciated that night? Thanks for sharing your thoughts on Colman.
Cogerson
Just something else I noticed. I compared the domestic gross you give with the worldwide gross on the bottom for Random Harvest, A Tale or Two Cities, and Kismet. The foreign gross for Kismet was 50.3% of the total gross. It was 51.6% for ATTC, and 43% for Random Harvest. The average for the three movies was 46.5%. (if I am wrong on percentages, it is my calculator’s fault)
Bottom line–this seems a high percentage of foreign take for a Hollywood star of that era. Am I right about that?
Hey John….I did a massive study…and the percent came out 62/38% domestic to international box office. So you are correct Ronald Colman’s percentages are well off the norm…..so I guess it is safe to assume that Colman had a massive following overseas….maybe all of those silent years helped with that….or that he was so popular in England. Eventually our database should be able to pull out the stars with the best international %….I am thinking Colman has an excellent change to make that Top 10. Thanks for a thought provoking comment.
Cogerson
What jumped out at me was that on the whole Colman’s top box office performances were in the silent era, off the box office rank by year info. Surprising to me.
I recently watched Kismet, and while not outstanding, I found it entertaining. I think despite a fair box office performance, it lost money because of a high budget. Watching it, I didn’t catch any tension between Colman and Dietrich in their “flirting” scenes. If they disliked each other, they were too much the pros to let it show on screen. I prefer this version of Kismet to the later musical, and Colman to Keel. And Dietrich, of course, is really fun.