James Mason was superb

James Mason gave a superb performance in the film. He was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar, but lost to Walter Matthau, a local Hollywood favorite who had just suffered and recovered from a heart-attack.

His performance really anchors the film, as it leads up the very moving ending.
The thing is Mason, with his beautiful playing, shows us he really loves Georgy Girl, in all her eccentricities. He is not just an old lecher lusting after a youner woman.

"Who would want old Georgy?" her own father (Mason's servant) tells him as they drink after his wife's funeral. Hearing this, Mason's face shows pain -- and his character's love for her.

Mason's character married a beautiful woman who was a bitch and an invalid (an invalid because she's a bitch). She doubles the character of Merdith, Georgy's pretty roommate/

We realize (through Mason's beauitufl playing) and the script that he has loved Georgy, truly, and is just not a (comical, foolish) dirty old man, or a pervert. (There is a reference to "Lolita" early on the film when Mason's character proposes she become his mistress, and of course, Mason played Humbert Humbert in Kubrick's film of the Nabokov novel.) At the end of the film, due to Mason's superb acting, we realize that his character loves Georgy as she is full of love, and he has lacked love in his own marriage.

I loved Walter Matthau, but the Oscar went to the wrong actor.

-----------------------------------------------

"Why do people always laugh in the wrong places?"
--Dolores Haze