Style Icon III: Robert Cummings

I slightly regret that I did not start this subject with some kind of ordered framework - but never mind! Sometimes, Robert Cummings (1910-1990), is said to have been the John the Baptist to Archie Leach's Cary Grant and adopted similar well-cut but understated clothes. He could even mimic an English accent in the earlier days of cinema when, as again now, this was a desirable trait. The son of a doctor and a church minister, he went to drama school because the family had been hit by financial disaster and he discovered that he would be paid to learn to act! He starred in the 1933 Ziegfeld Follies and is now especially remembered for Hitchcock's Saboteur (1942)and Dial M For Murder (1954). He was noted for the fact that he never carried anything in his pockets, to preserve the line of his suits.