Walter Pidgeon of his better known roles was in "The Dark Command", where he portrayed the villain (loosely based on American Civil War guerrilla William C. Quantrill) opposite John Wayne, Claire Trevor, and a young Roy Rogers. It was not until he starred in the Academy Award-winning Best Picture "How Green Was My Valley" (1941) that his popularity returned. He then starred opposite Greer Garson in "Blossoms in the Dust" (1941), "Mrs. Miniver" (1942) (for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor) and its sequel, "The Miniver Story" in 1950. He was also nominated in 1944 for "Madame
Mrs. Miniver RAF fighters in the V-for-Victory formation heading out to face the enemy. The film went into pre-production in the autumn of 1940, when the United States was still a neutral country. The script was written over many months, and during that time, the United States moved closer to war. As a result, scenes were re-written to reflect the increasingly pro-British and anti-German outlook of Americans. The scene in which Mrs. Miniver confronts a downed German flyer in her garden, for example, was made more and more confrontational with each new version of the script. It was initially filmed before the