David Niven

David Niven played Peter Carter in A Matter of Life and Death, which Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger directed together in 1946: the British squadron leader who jumps from his burning aircraft without a parachute and then fights, in the court he is brought before in the other world, for the right to stay among the living. Writing for Criterion, Stephanie Zacharek says Niven made even the film's most grandiloquent dialogue look ordinary and natural, carrying playfulness and weight at the same time. Twelve years later he took on Major David Angus Pollock in Separate Tables, which Delbert Mann adapted from Terence Rattigan's play, a loud man who talks of a public school education and of brave feats in the war. A newspaper report brings out that he was arrested in a cinema for indecent behaviour and that his war service was a lieutenancy at a supply depot in the West Indies. That part won him the lead actor Oscar.