Though she shared the screen with such stars as Elvis Presley, Montgomery Clift and Anna Magnani in the course of her brief acting career, Dolores Hart received more notice in Hollywood history books for her decision to abandon stardom for life as a nun in 1963
. A pert, intelligent and confident performer, Hart proved equally capable at both high drama like “Wild is the Wind” (1957) and lightweight fare like “Loving You” (1957), the first of two films opposite Presley, and “Where the Boys Are” (1960).
A retreat to the Benedictine Abbey of Regina Laudis in 1959 left Hart feeling a void in her life that could not be filled by acting, and in 1963, she left Hollywood to take her vows as a nun. For the next four decades, Hart led the monastic life of a Benedictine nun, returning occasionally to the spotlight to recall her religious calling, most notably for a 2012 documentary short, “God is the Bigger Elvis,” which received an Oscar nomination. Though her film career was an admirable footnote in her life, Hartâ¿¿s dedication to her religious order was proof positive that some things held greater resonance than Hollywood stardom.
She was born Dolores Hicks in Chicago, IL on Oct. 20, 1938. The daughter of actor Bert Hicks and his wife, Harriet, she was also related by marriage, through an aunt, to singer Mario Lanza. Her fatherâ¿¿s career immediately enamored Hart to such an extent that she planned to become an actress at an early age. But her parentsâ¿¿ divorce halted her chances of being a child performer, and she escaped the chaos of their split by relocating to Chicago to live with her grandparents. There, she received an education in Hollywood films from her grandfather, a projectionist at a local movie theater. Hart eventually returned to Los Angeles, where she earned the lead role in a school production of Saint Joan. A friend with connections to Paramount sent word to producer Hal Wallis about Hart, and he brokered a screen test and contract with the studio for her while she was still in her teens.
GOD IS THE BIGGER ELVIS, US poster art, Dolores Hart, 2012. HBO Films/Courtesy Everett Collection HBO/Courtesy Everett Collection ACHTUNG AUFNAHMEDATUM GESCHÄTZT PUBLICATIONxINxGERxSUIxAUTxONLY Copyright: xHBO/CourtesyxEverettxCollectionx MCDGOIS EC010
Hart made a considerable splash with her first film role as Elvis Presleyslove interest in the 1957 musical drama “Loving You” (1957). The success of the film made Hart an in-demand supporting performer, and she was soon cast in major productions like George Cukor’s Wild is the Wind” (1957) with Anthony Quinn and Anna Magnani, and “Lonelyhearts” (1958), a sanitized take on Nathaneal Wests novel Miss Lonelyhearts, with Montgomery Clift, Myrna Loy and Maureen Stapleton.
That same year, she reteamed with Presley for one of his best features, Michael Curtizâ¿¿s “King Creole” (1958). Such a string of prestigious projects seemed to indicate that Hart was destined for stardom.
But while filming the Western “The Plunderers” (1959), Hart began to feel pangs of doubt about the life of a professional actor. She experienced a career triumph that year with her Broadway debut in “The Pleasure of His Company” (1959), which earned her a Tony Award nomination and a Theatre World Award. She was later approached to reprise her performance in a 1961 film version, but soon discovered that Debbie Reynolds had been cast in the role.
Disillusioned and weary from the play’s schedule, she was advised by a friend to take a retreat at the Benedictine Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, CT. Hart found the experience physically and, more important, spiritually rejuvenating, and would return to the abbey several times over the next two years.
Hart worked steadily throughout 1960, scoring a hit with the then-controversial “Where the Boys Are” (1960) as one of four college girls exploring their sexuality while on spring break.
Her turn in “Francis of Assisi” (1961) as a young aristocrat who gave up her worldly possessions to follow the 13th century saint (Bradford Dillman) by becoming a nun proved remarkably prescient; after completing “The Inspector” (1962), an emotionally taxing film in which she played a Holocaust survivor, and the lightweight comedy “Come Fly With Me” (1963), Hart realized that she was in spiritual crisis. She broke off her engagement to Los Angeles businessman Don Robinson and returned to the Regina Laudis abbey, where she turned her back on the motion picture industry and began taking vows to become a nun.
Hart became Sister Dolores Hart after completing her vows in 1970. She embraced the monastic life of the order, which included several hours of prayer a day and maintaining the farm and property at the abbey.
Hart also spearheaded a project to further develop the abbey’s connection to the community around them through yearly theater productions, some of which were co-funded through her relationship with Hollywood talent like Paul Newman and Patricia Neal. In 1999, Hart suffered a crippling bout of peripheral idiopathic neuropathy disorder, a neurological disorder that left her wheelchair-bound for months.
After her recovery, Hart, who became Prioress of the Abbey in 2001, returned to Hollywood for the first time in 43 years to help raise awareness about the disorder, and later testified before a Congressional hearing on her ordeal. In 2012, Hart made headlines for her appearance on the red carpet at the 2012 Academy Awards. She was promoting the documentary short subject “God is the Bigger Elvis” (2012), which chronicled her journey from Hollywood to the abbey. It was her first appearance at a Hollywood event since 1959.
By Paul Gaita
The TCM Overview can also be accessed online here.
Dame Olivia de Havilland, who has died aged 104, was one of the last surviving cast members of Gone With the Wind (1939). Her portrayal of the saintly Melanie Hamilton earned her an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress and, to the modern eye, while Vivien Leigh’s Scarlett now seems mannered, de Havilland’s precocious maturity is still touching.
She was four times nominated for a best actress Academy Award, and won twice, for To Each His Own (1946) and The Heiress (1949). But her impact on her industry extended far beyond her acting ability. Her sufferings under the restrictions of the notorious Hollywood studio system pushed her to take her employers, Warner Brothers, to court. It cost her several years of her career, but her victory – still referred to as the “De Havilland decision” – changed irrevocably the way that actors would be treated by studios.
De Havilland had originally been signed to a seven-year contract at Warner Brothers just as the studio, also home to the director Michael Curtiz and leading man Errol Flynn, was exploring a new physical freedom on sound stages and locations to create a series of swashbucklers.
Her sweetness, and evident crush on Flynn (“You’d have been in trouble, too,” she once said about how overwhelming it was to partner him on screen, at the age of 19) made her the perfect damsel, in Captain Blood (1935), The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939), Dodge City (1939), Santa Fe Trail (1940), They Died With Their Boots On (1941), and, best of all, as Maid Marian in the 1938 Adventures of Robin Hood, in which she was sparky enough not to seem soppy.
She began to build a quiet strength and was loaned out to David O Selznick at his request to play the virtuous Melanie in Gone With the Wind. Then, determined not to go back to being “the girl” at Warners, playing ingenues, she rebelled, refusing to take the parts offered to her, and found herself suspended for six months.
She returned to work in The Strawberry Blonde (1941), cast as a plain woman (no prosthetics – plainness was implied in the script and by severity of hair-do) alongside Rita Hayworth, and in Hold Back the Dawn (1941), as a schoolmarm who is a suave con artist’s ticket to a US visa. She was nominated for an Oscar for that.
When her seven years at Warners ended after Princess O’Rourke (1943), the company would not release her, adding her periods of suspension to her contract. “You were a great celebrity but also a slave,” she said, so she read the small print and sued Warners under old Californian laws that prohibited employers from treating workers as serfs. She won and the De Havilland decision, along with a judicial ruling fought for Bette Davis, ended the old studio system by limiting contracts to a total of seven years, suspensions included.
The battles lasted for three years, and, kept off-screen throughout, De Havilland toured US military hospitals in the Pacific where she talked to and comforted wounded service personnel. After her court win Warners warned other studios off her, although she eventually found work at Paramount.
She returned in 1946 in To Each His Own, as the mother of an illegitimate child whose father had been killed in war, and who had turned over the baby for adoption. De Havilland’s good sense tempered the drama’s weepiness, and she won her Oscar at last.
In The Dark Mirror, the same year, she played rivalrous twin sisters; a Hollywood in-joke, for De Havilland’s younger sister, Joan Fontaine, had made a slower professional start, but had beaten her to an Oscar. (The sisters were estranged for most of their adult lives.)
De Havilland went on taking risks: she played a psychiatric patient in Anatole Litvak’s The Snake Pit (1948): meant as a plea for humane treatment in asylums, it now looks as crude as the shock treatment it advocated.
She won her second Oscar in 1949, for William Wyler’s The Heiress, an adaptation of Henry James’s novella Washington Square. Near the end of the film, De Havilland, bundled up in knitted mittens and tippets to conceal her natural glamour, addresses Montgomery Clift, playing a fortune-hunter who years earlier failed to elope with her.
She refuses him another chance. She can be cruel, she says: “I’ve been taught by masters.” You don’t quite believe the cruelty, but you do believe the strength behind the delivery. De Havilland was accused of being unsympathetic, but it took nerve to play a woman who achieves a solitary dignity only after being derided and rejected by father and would-be lover, and it was one of her finest roles.
De Havilland was just into her 30s, yet her career was petering out: her hard-won savvy was not overtly sexual enough. She was offered Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, but felt uncomfortable with the lewdness in the role, which went to Leigh. Fontaine had broken through in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca; De Havilland’s du Maurier film, My Cousin Rachel (1952), was more like a valediction.
She appeared on Broadway as Juliet in 1951, more plausibly as the Shavian wife Candida in 1952, and returned, alongside Henry Fonda, in A Gift of Time, in 1962.
Like other ageing female stars in the 1960s, she was tormented viciously onscreen, beside Davis in Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), and in Sam Peckinpah’s television movie Noon Wine (1966). In the 70s and 80s, retreating to small TV roles, she won a Golden Globe in Anastasia: The Mystery of Anna (1986).
Born in Tokyo, Olivia was the daughter of British parents, Lillian (nee Ruse), an actor, and Walter de Havilland, a patent lawyer related to the family of aviators. After separating from Walter, Lillian took the three-year-old Olivia and the infant Joan to California. Her paternal family originated in the Channel Islands; her cousin Geoffrey was the aircraft designer responsible for producing the famous second world war plane, the Mosquito.
Olivia went to a convent school and, at 17, was spotted in a college production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The director Max Reinhardt, on the lookout for girls with appearances classier than the local cheerleader norm, cast her as Hermia in the same play, first live in the Hollywood Bowl and then in the Warner Brothers film of 1935: “You are my discovering!” he boasted.
De Havilland had early been a member of the screen actors’ union and was a staunch liberal, campaigning for Franklin D Roosevelt and Harry Truman; in 1958 she was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, then in its dying throes. The US gave her the National Medal of Arts in 2008, France made her a chevalier of the Légion d’honneur in 2010, and in 2017 she was made a DBE.
In the docudrama series Feud: Bette and Joan (2017), chronicling the rivalry between Davis and Joan Crawford, De Havilland was portrayed by Catherine Zeta-Jones. The real-life De Havilland objected to how its creators “used my identity without my consent and put false words in my mouth, including having me publicly calling my sister, Joan Fontaine, a ‘bitch’.” But in March 2018 a California appeals court dismissed her lawsuit on grounds of free speech.
There were romances with James Stewart and John Huston before she married, in 1946, and divorced, in 1952, the novelist Marcus Goodrich, with whom she had a son, Benjamin, who died in 1991.
She met Pierre Galante, then editor of the magazine Paris-Match, at the 1955 Cannes film festival, and moved to France after their marriage. They divorced in 1979, but she cared for him in his last illness in 1998; their daughter, Gisèle, survives her.
• Olivia Mary de Havilland, actor, born 1 July 1916; died 26 July 2020
Cathleen Nesbitt hailed from Belfast where she attended Queen’s University. In 1911 she joined the Irish Players and performed with them in the U.S. in Synge’s “The Well of the Saints” and “The Playboy of the Western World”. She was the love of the poet Rupert Brooke who was to die in World War One. An interesting article on their releationship can be sourced on the Telegraph website here.
Over the next thirty years she made many British theatre and film appearances. In 1951 she was on Broadway with Audrey Hepburn in “Gigi” and made her first American film in 1953 which was “Three Coins in the Fountain”. In 1956 she was back on Broadway again in “My Fair Lady”.Her last film was in 1980 when she made “The Never Never Land” at the age of 92. She died two years later.
IMDB entry:
The Calendar by Edgar Wallace (1875-1932), 1929. Lady Panniford, played by Cathleen Nesbitt (1888-1982), left, and Garry Anson, played bu Owen Nares (1888-1943), right. The Play, vol. 55, no. 331, (Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images) *** Local Caption ***Family Plot, lobbycard, (aka LA TRAMA), left top to bottom: Karen Black, Bruce Dern, Barbara Harris, Alfred Hitchcock, center from left: Cathleen Nesbitt, Barbara Harris, 1976. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
Diminutive, genteel Cathleen Nesbitt was a grand dame of the theatre on both sides of the Atlantic in a career spanning seven decades. Among almost 300 roles on stage, she excelled at comic portrayals of sophisticated socialites and elegant mothers. Hollywood used her, whenever a gentler, sweeter version of Gladys Cooper was needed, yet someone still possessed of a subtly sarcastic wit and turn of phrase. Cathleen attended Queen’s University in Belfast and the Sorbonne in Paris. Encouraged by a friend of her father – none other than the legendary Sarah Bernhardt – to enter the acting profession, she was taken on by Victorian actress and drama teacher Rosina Filippi (1866-1930). Cathleen’s first appearance on stage was in 1910 at the Royalty Theatre in London. This was followed in November 1911 by her Broadway debut with the touring Abbey Theatre Players in ‘The Well of the Saints’.
From here on, and for the rest of her long life, she was never out of a job, demonstrating her range and versatility by playing anything from villainesses to being a much acclaimed Kate in Shakespeare’s ‘The Taming of the Shrew’, Perdita in ‘The Winter’s Tale’, Audrey Hepburn‘s grandaunt in ‘Gigi’, the Dowager Empress in ‘Anastasia’ and the gossipy ‘humorously animated’ Julia Shuttlethwaite of T.S. Eliot‘s ‘The Cocktail Party’. Her Mrs. Higgins in ‘My Fair Lady’, Brooks Atkinson described as played with ‘grace and elegance’, which also pretty much sums up Cathleen’s career in films.
Her first motion picture role was a lead in the drama The Faithful Heart (1922), adapted from an Irish play. She then absented herself from the screen for the next decade, resurfacing in supporting roles in British films, though rarely cast in worthy parts, possible exceptions being Man of Evil (1944) and Jassy (1947). Her strengths were rather better showcased during her sojourn in Hollywood, which began in 1952. In addition to prolific appearances in anthology television, she also appeared in several big budget films, most memorably as Cary Grant‘s perspicacous grandmother in An Affair to Remember (1957) and as gossipy Lady Matheson (alongside Gladys Cooper) in Separate Tables (1958). One of her last roles of note was as Julia Rainbird, who instigates the mystery in Alfred Hitchcock‘s final film, Family Plot (1976).
On the instigation of her friend Anita Loos, author of ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’, Cathleen wrote her memoirs, ‘A Little Love and Good Company’ in 1977. For her extraordinarily long career in the acting profession, she was awarded a CBE in the Queen’s Honours List the following year. She retired just two years prior to her death in 1983 at the age of 93.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: I.S.Mowis
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
Her obituary in “The Los Angeles Times” can be accessed here.
“Slinky, sensational – was how Lauren Bacall came to the screen, along with the press releases as to ho her husky voice had been developed by making her shout across a canyon for six months. But she was not a joke at all. James Agate described her – she has cinema personality to burn and she burns both ends against an unusually little middle. Her personality is compounded of percolated Davis, Garbo, West, Dietrich, Harlow and Glenda Farrell, but more than enough of it is completely new to the screen. She had a javelin like vitality, a born dancer’s eloquence in movement, a fierce female shrewdness and a special sweet-sourness. With these faculities, plus a stone-crushing self-confidence and a trombone voice, she manages to get across the toughest girl a piously regenerate Hollywood has dreamed of in a long while. She does a wickedly good job of sizing up male prospects in a low bar, growls a louche song more suggestively than anyone in cinema has dared since Mae est” – David Shioman in “The Great Movie Stars – The International Stars” (1972).
Lauren Bacall will be forever associated with the films she made with her husband Humphrey Bogart. They made four films together and three of them “To Have and Have Not”, “The Big Sleep” and “Key Largo” are regarded as classics. Ms Bacall has many other fims to her credit including “Murder On the Orient Express” and “North West Frontier”. She died in 2014 at the age of 89..
Vernioca Horwell’s obituary in the Guardian”:
She was a nice Jewish girl brought up right by mother in two rooms on the wrong side of the tracks in Manhattan, her father long fled from their lives. She was so nervous in her first film role, at all of 19 years old, that her head shook; so she tilted her chin down to steady herself, and had to look up from under at the camera. She stood at the bedroom door of “a hotel in Martinique in the French West Indies” – the Warner Bros lot in Hollywood – looked up, and askedHumphrey Bogart for a match. And defined her life.
At that incendiary moment in 1944 when she made her screen debut in To Have and Have Not, Lauren Bacall, who has died aged 89, was still Betty Bacall, and had been recently Betty Perske, a stagestruck teenager whose poor family finances bought her a bare year at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts (fellow pupil and first crush, Kirk Douglas), and whose fought-for early parts were in flops. She had to pay her way as an usherette and model, an unglam garment trade live dummy, until her photogenic potential was spotted by Diana Vreeland, fashion editor of Harper’s Bazaar. Vreeland had an instinct for the face of the times, for a movie in a single still; and the shot that begat Bacall was a Bazaar cover, Betty besuited before a Red Cross office door. It’s lit noirishly, and she is acting independent – a frank, clever gal caught up in the war effort.
It was seen in Hollywood by David O Selznick, and Columbia pictures; both inquired after her. But the real connection was made by Nancy “Slim” Hawks, wife of the director Howard Hawks, who seems to have recognised in Betty’s stance a style much like her own, plus the physical substance of her husband’s dreams. She alerted Hawks, and Bacall was invited to travel by train across America on the 20th Century Limited to be screen-tested; Hawks offered her a personal contract. Bacall treated him as a surrogate father, and understood only later that he always wanted to be Svengali, making over a kid from nowhere into his desirable girl. His fantasy woman was sexually experienced and insolent; Hawks had hung out with Ernest Hemingway and company, who (as Slim complained after the marriage was over) wanted females who did not wimp out or whinge about the big game hunting, the hard drinking and harder bullshitting – but who were young enough not to be equals, so that they were never a threat.
Bacall sweated out months in Hollywood, showing off on demand as a protege at parties or sitting in her first car up a canyon bawling The Robe aloud by the hour to lower her voice – Hawks disliked women screeching; she bottomed out close in tone to a trombone. Two packs of cigarettes a day helped the baritone. At last Hawks developed a character for her, a near-tramp named “Slim”, in an approximate adaptation of Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not, starring Jack Warner’s alpha male, Bogart. The film was a wittier riff on Bogart’s previous smasheroo, Casablanca, and it was a hell of a way for a girl to sashay into movies.
Hawks’s creation became the fantasy of a generation when she growled at Bogart that he need do nothing but whistle – “You know how to whistle, don’t you? … You just put your lips together and blow.” If the lines had been delivered by a savvy contemporary of Bogart (say his Maltese Falcon co-star Mary Astor), and not a naive girl acting worldly, most men in the audience would have hid under the seat for a week. The critic James Agee thought Bacall provocative and preposterous, both a wolfwhistle and a belly laugh. He was wrong about her “stonecrushing confidence” (she had none and acquired little), but he did understand that she was a construct.
What had not been invented, though, what made the film hot, was the reactive chemistry between Bacall (renamed “Lauren”, a Hawks attempt at swank) and Bogart, then 44 and on his third marriage, to the drunk, slugging actor Mayo Methot. B & B called each other by their characters’ names, Steve and Slim, they joshed, they lit each other’s cigarettes in instinctive rapport, they fell in love, although whether with the reality of each other or with the parts they were playing no one will ever know. Long after, even she couldn’t say.
Hawks was jealous. He warned Bacall not to risk ending her career just as it began: the film was a big pop success. Since in Hollywood no therm of sexual heat can be wasted, he then cast Bacall and Bogart in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1946). The edgy ruefulness of that movie probably derived from their relationship during the shooting; Bogart wanted to marry his fresh start and also to behave like a gent towards Mayo; Bacall was obsessed with her adoring hero. They shared a private humour in their scripted exchanges – Bacall’s part bumped up on the suggestion of the sharp talent agent, Charlie Feldman – and their innuendo was wicked; no onscreen shag could show what Bacall suggested just by scratching her stockinged thigh. Yet you sense that nothing is sure between them. Bogart missed days on set, drunk, depressed: then he made up his mind. As his divorce crawled through, he sent her a wire: “Please fence me in Baby – the world’s too big out here and I don’t like it without you.” They married in 1945. Bacall walked willingly into his world – the pals of his generation, his continuing affair with his toupee-maker, his liquor consumption (high, but controlled), his refuge of a yacht, the Santana – as if her wedding vows had been those of the biblical Ruth: “Thy people shall be my people, and thy land” – well-staffed houses in the Hollywood Hills above Sunset Strip – “my land.
Hawks had been spot on about her career, as was the playwright Moss Hart, who told her: “You realise from here you have nowhere to go but down.” Those two films were the best she did. Without Bogart, in The Confidential Agent (1945), she seemed cold not cool, minus the zap of her Hawksian dames. She was cast with Bogart again in Dark Passage, and in John Huston’s Key Largo (1948), but in both she was sombre and self-effacing, having by degrees dwindled into wifely respectability. Bogart did not want her to be actor first and wife second – his own King Kong-like fantasy of a woman was that she should fit into a man’s pocket, to be displayed on the palm of his hand, expanded to full-size when desired, and contracted back on command.
She wanted to make him happy, to be Bogart’s Baby and to have Bogart’s babies. In 1947, she went to Washington with a well-intentioned but politically innocent group, including Bogart and John Huston, to protest against the anti-leftwing bullying of the House Un-American Activities Committee; five years later she campaigned for the unsuccessful Democratic presidential candidate, Adlai Stevenson, another father mentor. She bore Bogart’s children, Steve and Leslie, supplied antibiotics to sick location crews on The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The African Queen, learned to sip Jack Daniel’s through a long evening. When the Hollywood rat pack (qualifications: nonconformity, drinking, laughing) was first formed in a private room at Romanoff’s, she was voted Den Mother, never out of humour.
Bacall was playing for real a high-grade version of the postwar homemaker bride, but she was not in many movies. Hawks sold her contract to Jack Warner, who suspended her 12 times for refusing poor roles; 50s models of women were rolling off a new production line. Class now meant the aloofness of Grace Kelly; sass meant the vulnerable trashiness of Marilyn Monroe. None of them were sensual as Bacall had been, or as direct, straight-talking and brave. What happened to the image of women after 1945 is summed up in the difference between Bacall unfazed by Bogart’s drunk sidekick in To Have and Have Not (who grudgingly admits “Lady, you’re all right”) and Bacall unamused as the mink-pursuer in How to Marry a Millionaire (1953). And that was considered a good part. She bought out her contract, but all that expensive gesture purchased was a soapy role in Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind (1956) through which, you hope hopelessly, she will take tormented Robert Stack out for a belt of bourbon; and another refrigerated career girl in Designing Woman (1957).
Warner Bros was planning in 1956 to team Bogart and Bacall again, in the love story of a military man and a journalist. Just perfect, only it never got made, because that was the year Bacall watched Bogart die from cancer of the oesophagus at the age of 57. In her 1978 autobiography, By Myself, she described his dissolution with the unflinching candour he would have expected of her: the odour of decay on his kiss, the old robe from Dark Passage she wore the night he died in the bed they had long shared, the sack in which his body was taken away to Forest Lawn crematorium.
She displayed a model of the Santana at the funeral – a spirit ship indeed – and sold the real boat. The role of the Widow Bogart, relict of a myth, was not the lifetime part she wanted, although the relative honour of his Hollywood meant more to her as decades passed. His death was the beginning of the bad times. Her comforting but uncomfortable affair with Frank Sinatra froze over: her second marriage, to the actor Jason Robards, produced her third child, Sam, but foundered because of his drinking, and maybe because she was growing into the maturity she had always implied.
The heroine she could have been onscreen was seen for the last time in an unpretentious British adventure, North West Frontier (1959): her governess, boarding a trainload of corpses to retrieve a live baby, has a warmth and strength still not often allowed women in the movies. And certainly not Bacall thereafter. “Film is not a woman’s medium,” she wrote: “If you weren’t the hottest kid in town, men stayed away from you.” She was a mere 42 when she took a cameo as a jaded California invalid in the noir-lite Harper (1966), and most of her subsequent film turns exhibited her as a matron – sometimes amiable (James Caan’s literary agent in Misery, 1990, John Wayne’s landlady in The Shootist, 1976), more often monstrous – a tragedienne disguised as a parvenu in Murder on the Orient Express (1974), Barbra Streisand’s mother – less of a dinosaur than the daughter – in The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996), for which she won a Golden Globe as best supporting actress. She needed the money; Bogart had bequeathed her custodianship of the legend but not megabucks, as the studio system never generated millions for its stars.
Real work satisfaction came more from her long-delayed Broadway career. George Axelrod constructed his 1959 comedy Goodbye Charlie around her; then she starred in Cactus Flower (1965), in the theatre where she had once ushered in white cuffs – although Ingrid Bergman stole her part in the movie. In 1970, she grabbed the Bette Davis role as an ageing diva of the Martini in Applause, a musical adaptation of All About Eve. It wasn’t much of a musical, but who gave a damn; she got the chance to be the Bacall she had always wanted to be – as Alistair Cooke wrote, as “fragile as a moose”. Her leading man, Len Cariou, was her lover for a while; she picked up a Tony award; a Life magazine cover showed a sexy woman laughing, arm flung up in triumph. The earned success was transient, although she won another Tony in an update of Katharine Hepburn‘s journalist role in a musical of the film Woman of the Year (1981).
Bacall kept on working, admitting that every job, especially on stage, reverted her to youthful nervousness. Harold Pinter directed her in the first London production of Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth (1985), and Terry Hands less successfully in Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Visit at Chichester in 1995. As age broadened that 24-inch waist and chiselled face, she decisively restyled herself, with help from a trainer and the make-up artist Kevyn Aucoin, as a lioness in winter, her wavy mane tamed, the better to emphasis the graphic eyebrows, always her most distinctive feature, and gruff voice. A late magnificence was visible in Robert Altman’s Prêt-à-Porter (1995), and in her awesome matriarchs in Lars von Trier’s Dogville (2003) and Manderlay (2005), and Jonathan Glaser’s Birth (2004).
That worked-on voice retained its power to the last, especially for witches (voiceovers in Howl’s Moving Castle, 2004, and Scooby-Doo and the Goblin King, 2008), and for aged dames who were still trouble (The Forger, 2012). The most accurate casting was her turn as a Washington social grandee in Paul Schrader’s neo-noir The Walker (2007), demolishing Woody Harrelson’s gay escort with the line: “Memory is a very unreliable organ: it’s right up there with the penis.”
She herself went unescorted in age, unbothered about it, and was proprietorial about the definition of a movie “legend” after over 60 years in gainful employment: less than a couple of decades of stardom, she said, and you were just a beginner. In 2009 she received an honorary Oscar.
Lunching with her was an audience with the last empress of Byzantium, imperiousness interspersed with a really dirty laugh, perhaps the sound of her true self. Every online search sends you back to a picture of her at 19 giving The Look: “You know, Steve, you don’t have to say anything. You don’t have to do anything. You just have to whistle.”
She is survived by Steve, Leslie and Sam.
• Lauren Bacall (Betty Joan Perske), actor, born 16 September 1924; died 12 August 2014
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
A link to her biography on “The Jewish Virtual Library” can be accessed here.
Margaret Leighton died yesterday at the age of 53. She was an actress as intelligent as she was beautiful. From her youth she had rare poise and period sense qualities evident in her final part, a Compton Burnett dowager in last year’s stage version of “A Family and a Fortune.”
Born in Worcestershire on February 26, 1922, and educated at Birmingham, she was one of Sir Barry Jackson’s Repertory Theatre discoveries. In 1938, as a tall, glowingly fair girl of 16, she began by scrubbing the stage and doing the work of a junior ASM. Early in the war she toured with Basil Langton’s company; but it was at the Repertory, especially between 1942 and 1944, that in such parts as Katharina, Rosalind, Barrie’s Lady Babbie, and the step-daughter in Six Characters”, she made the great regional reputation, justified during three years in London with the Old Vic. During the first three years, 1944-47, of the company’s famous stay at the New Theatre, she acted, among much else, Raina in “Arms and the Man”, Yelena in “Uncle Vanya”, Roxane in “Cyrano de Bergerac”, and a Regan, to Olivier’s Lear.
Always she was far more than decorative. She had a cutting truth, and her repetory training (though she never entirely lost her nervousness) prepared her for anything. From the Vic company she went to to a trio of parts in the Criterion revival of Bridie’s “A Sleeping Clergyman” (1947), welcoming the chance to act with Robert Donat: later she was with him in the film version of “The Winslow Boy”, her introduction to the work of Terence Rattigan.
She was Celia in the London production of “The Cocktail Party” (1950) and 12 months later appeared as Masha in a revival of “Three Sisters” for Festival of Britain year. In 1952, as Stratford upon Avon’s leading lady again, it was said, as the toast of the Midlands, she was Lady Macbeth, a Rosalind of jetting raillery and an Ariel described by a critic as a silver arrow.
Afterwards, though she remained among the first half dozen of English actresses, she never found the sustained full-scale triumph (long runs aside) for which one had hoped. Certainly there were long runs. After a few months as Orinthia to Noel Coward’s Magnus in the Haymarket revival of “The Apple Cart” (1953) and another Eliot heroine, Lucasta in “The Confidential Clerk”, she had nearly four years, in London and on Broadway, as two amply contrasted characters in the double bill of Terence Rattigan’s “Separate Tables”. Her Rose, a former Midland girl, in his “Variations on a Theme” (Globe, London, 1958) had to be less satisfying. She acted a gleaming Beatrice to Sir John Gielgud’s Benedick in New York (September, 1959). Then, after two more London parts – the second of them Ellida in “The Lady From the Sea” (1961) – she spent five years in New York where she won the Antoinette Perry Award for the best actress of 1961-62, as Hannah in Tennessee Williams’s “The Night of the Iguana”. She was also in Enid Bagnold’s “The Chinese Prime Minister” when the dramatist spoke of her as “an extraordinary and shining woman, made of moonshine and talent and deep self-distrust, astonished at success.”
Her return to London (1967) was in an undemanding play “Cactus Flower”. Within two years at the Chichester Festival, she reached the part many thought she should play, Shakespeare’s Cleopatra (to the Antony of Sir John Clements), royal in her aspect but never theatrically voluptuous. But the Festival period was brief. And of her three later parts, two were at Chichester, Mrs Malaprop in “The Rivals” and Elena in “Reunion in Vienna” (also for a short time in London). Finally there was the dowager she acted with such sharp assurance in “A Family and a Fortune” (Apollo, 1975). These were all performances, varying in scope, and of much style and vigour in execution, but without the transcendent quality we knew Margaret Leighton could achieve. We hoped she might again. It is too late now;but she is remembered, as “Maggie”, in and out of the theatre, with deep affection.
Margaret Leighton acted in several films besides “The Winslow Boy”. She received a Best Supporting Actress Award for her performance in “The Go-Between” in 1971, and her other credits included “The Loved One” (1965), “Lady Caroline Lamb” (1972), and “Bequest to the Nation” (1973). She was married three times – to Max Reinhardt, to Laurence Harvey, and lastly to Michael Wilding. The above “Times” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Pier Angeli was born in 1932 and was an Italian-born television and film actress. Her American cinematographic debut was in the starring role of the 1951 film Teresa, for which she won a Golden Globe Award for Young Star of the Year – Actress. She had one son with Vic Damone, her first husband, and another son with Armando Trovajoli, her second husband. Her twin sister is the actress Marisa Pavan.
During the 1960s and until 1970, Angeli lived and worked in Britain and Europe, and was often screen-credited under her birth name, Anna Maria Pierangeli. Her performance in The Angry Silence (1960) was nominated for a Best Foreign Actress BAFTA, and she was reunited with Stewart Granger for Sodom and Gomorrah (1963), in which she played Lot’s wife. She had a brief role in the war epic Battle of the Bulge (1965). 1968 found Angeli in Israel, top billed in Every Bastard a King, about events during that nation’s recent war.
According to Kirk Douglas‘ autobiography, he and Angeli were engaged in the 1950s after meeting on the set of the film The Story of Three Loves (1953). Angeli also had a brief romantic relationship with James Dean. She broke it off because her mother was not happy with their relationship as he was not Catholic.
Angeli was married to singer and actor Vic Damone from 1954 to 1958. During their marriage, they appeared as guests on the June 17, 1956 episode of What’s My Line?. Their divorce was followed by highly publicized court battles for the custody of their only child, son Perry (1955–2014).
Angeli next married Italian composer Armando Trovajoli in 1962. She had another son, Howard, in 1963. She and Trovajoli were separated in 1969.
In 1971, at the age of 39, Angeli was found dead of a barbiturate overdose at her home in Beverly Hills. She is interred in the Cimetière des Bulvis in Rueil-Malmaison, Hauts-de-Seine, France.
Marisa Pavan was born in Sardinia in 1932 and is the twin sister of the actress Pier Angeli. Pavan’s breaktrough role came in 1955 as the daughter of Anna Magnani in “The Rose Tattoo” based on the play by Tennessee Williams.
Pavan was nominated foran Oscar for her performance. She was married to the late French actor Jean-Pierre Aumont.
TCM Overview:
The twin sister of actress Pier Angeli, Marisa Pavan was generally cast in gentle roles during her brief career as a leading lady of 1950s films. The attractive, Italian-born brunette made her motion picture debut in John Ford’s 1952 remake of “What Price Glory?”, playing a sweet village girl, and followed as a doomed Native American in love with Indian fighter Alan Ladd in Delmar Daves’ “Drum Beat” (1954).
Pavan won a Golden Globe Award and earned an Oscar nomination for her performance as the sensitive teenaged daughter of the formidable Anna Magnani in “The Rose Tattoo” (1955).
She held her own in the costume epic “Diane” (also 1955), in which she competed with Lana Turner for the affections of Roger Moore.
In Nunnally Johnson’s “The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit” (1956), Pavan brought warmth and believability to her role as the war-time love of Gregory Peck.
After appearing opposite Tony Curtis in the taut mystery “The Midnight Story” (1957) and two more costume epics, “John Paul Jones” and “Solomon and Sheba” (1959), the actress retired from the big screen for more than a decade.
A mini-biography on Marisa Pavan can be viewed on the TCM website here.
Marisa Pavan died at her home in France in 2023 at the age of 91.
The Hollywood Reporter obituary in 2023:
Maria Luisa Pierangeli and her sister (birth name Anna Maria Pierangeli, who was older by a few minutes) were born on June 19, 1932, in Cagliari, Sardinia, Italy. Their father, Luigi, was an architect and construction engineer, and their mother, Enrica, was a homemaker who once dreamed of being an actress.
“My mother adored Shirley Temple and took us to see all her movies,” Pavan said in Jane Allen’s 2002 book, Pier Angeli: A Fragile Life. “She even dressed us like Shirley Temple, hence the big bows in our hair.”
The family moved to Rome in the mid-1930s and was threatened when the Nazis occupied the city.
When she was 16, Anna was strolling along the Via Veneto on the way home from art school when she was discovered by Vittorio De Sica, and she portrayed a teenager on the verge of a sexual awakening opposite him in Tomorrow Is Too Late (1950). That brought her to the attention of MGM, which cast her in Teresa (1951), signed her to a seven-year contract and gave her the stage name Pier Angeli.
Angeli and her sister then moved to Los Angeles, and Maria, with no acting experience, was signed by Fox. Newly christened Marisa Pavan, she made her big-screen debut as a French girl in John Ford’s World War I-set What Price Glory (1952), starring James Cagney and Dan Dailey.
Pavan then appeared in 1954 in the film noir Down Three Dark Streetsand in the Western Drum Beat, starring Broderick Crawford and Alan Ladd, respectively, before she broke out in The Rose Tattoo.
Pavan also co-starred in a pair of epic adventures released in 1959, playing Robert Stack’s love interest in John Farrow’s John Paul Jones(1959) and the servant Abishag in King Vidor’s Solomon and Sheba(1959). In the latter, she worked alongside Yul Brynner, who joined the film in Spain after the sudden death of Tyrone Power.
Pavan worked mainly in television after that, with stints on such shows as The United States Steel Hour, Naked City, 77 Sunset Strip, Combat!, The F.B.I., Wonder Woman, Hawaii Five-O and The Rockford Files.
Marisa Pavan and Tony Curtis on the set of 1957’s ‘The Midnight Story’ COURTESY EVERETT COLLECTION
In 1976, she appeared as Kirk Douglas‘ mentally ill wife in the Arthur Hailey NBC miniseries The Moneychangers, and she played Chantal Dubujak, mother of crime lord Max DuBujak (Daniel Pilon), in 1985 on the ABC soap opera Ryan’s Hope.
Angeli, who dated James Dean before she married singer Vic Damone and portrayed the wife of champion boxer Rocky Marciano (played by Paul Newman) in 1956’s Somebody Up There Likes Me, died in 1971 at age 39 of a barbiturate overdose at a Beverly Hills apartment. It was never firmly established whether she died by suicide or suffered a reaction to prescribed medication.
Pavan was married to French actor Jean-Pierre Aumont (her castmate in John Paul Jones) from 1956 until his 2001 death. Survivors include her sons, Jean-Claude (a cinematographer) and Patrick, and her younger sister, Patrizia Pierangeli, also an actress
Michael York garnered very favourable reviews for his first three major films in the 1960’s. They were Joseph Losey’s “Accident” and Franco Zefferelli’s “The Taming of the Shrew” and “Romeo and Juliet”. After the success of the film “Cabreet” with Liza Minnelli, he went to Hollywood. Although he makes films all over the world, he is now based in the USA. He recently received recognition with younger audiences with his participation in the Austin Powers film where he plays Basil Exposition.
A classically trained British actor who honed his craft on the stage, Michael York made a smooth transition to the screen with several noted Shakespearean performances in films made by Italian director Franco Zeffirelli. Though not a leading performer, York delivered strong turns as Lucentino in “The Taming of the Shrew” (1967) and Tybalt in “Romeo and Juliet” (1968), before he played more seductively charming men in “Something for Everyone” (1970) and “Cabaret” (1972). While starring as D’Artagnan in “The Three Musketeers” (1973) and Logan in the sci-fi cult classic “Logan’s Run” (1976), he also turned to television to play Pip in “Great Expectations” (NBC, 1974) and John the Baptist in the epic miniseries “Jesus of Nazareth” (NBC, 1977).
In the following decade, York joined the cast of “Knot’s Landing” (CBS, 1979-1993), while stepping back into guest starring spots on shows like “Babylon 5” (TNT, 1993-98) and “Sliders” (Fox, 1995-99). Though he made fewer appearances on the big screen later in his career, York was quite memorable as the affable Basil Exposition in the “Austin Power” series, starring Mike Myers. As he continued forward, York diversified his talents to include voice work for both animated projects and a host of audiobooks, which served to underscore the wide breadth of the actor’s talents.
Born on March 27, 1942 in Fulmer, Buckinghamshire, England, York was raised in the London suburb of Burgess Hill by his father, Joseph Johnson, an ex-army officer-turned-executive for Marks and Spencer department stores, and his mother, Florence, a musician. While receiving his education at Bromley Grammar School for Boys, he began his acting career as a teenager in a production of “The Yellow Jacket” (1956). Three years later, York made his West End debut with a one-line role in a staging of William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.” He continued to study acting at Oxford University, where he was a member of the Dramatic Society, and spent his summers working with Michael Croft’s Youth Theatre while touring Italy in a production of “Julius Caesar.”
From there, he joined the Dundee Repertory Theatre in Scotland, where he played Sergius in “Arms and the Man” (1964) and first adopted the name Michael York. That same year, he graduated from Oxford and was invited to join England’s National Theatre, which led him to be immediately cast by Italian director Franco Zeffirelli in his production of “Much Ado About Nothing” (1965).
With his stage career taking off, York took the logical next stepping of making his screen debut as Young Jolyon in the acclaimed and fondly remembered drama series “The Forsyte Saga” (BBC, 1966). A year later, Michael York made his feature debut as Lucentino in Zeffirelli’s film, “The Taming of the Shrew” (1967), starring the tumultuous Elizabeth Taylor and her on-again/off-again husband Richard Burton. Now a bona fide movie actor, York scored again as Tybalt in Zeffirelli’s next Shakespearean screen adaptation “Romeo and Juliet” (1968).
Later that same year, York married his sweetheart, Patricia, an American photographer, whom he met while filming “Smashing Time” (1969) when she was assigned to photograph the star. The couple remained husband and wife well into the next century. Meanwhile, York went on to effectively portray a variety of well-bred, charming men like the manipulative bisexual of “Something for Everyone” (1970) and the adventurous expatriate in Bob Fosse’s Academy Award-winning “Cabaret” (1972), opposite Liza Minnelli.
From there, his role as D’Artagnan in Richard Lester’s romping version of “The Three Musketeers” (1973) and as Logan in the cult sci-fi classic “Logan’s Run” (1976) cemented York’s cinematic stardom on both sides of the pond. He played opposite Burt Lancaster in the critically panned adaptation of H.G. Wells’ “The Island of Dr. Moreau” (1977) and he even played himself in Billy Wilder’s old fashioned missive on Hollywood, “Fedora” (1977). A series of well-received landmark TV miniseries followed, including roles as the Charles Dickens’ hero Pip in “Great Expectations” (NBC, 1974) and a reteaming with his illustrious mentor Zeffirelli in “Jesus of Nazareth” (NBC, 1977), where he played John the Baptist to Robert Powell’s titular Jesus. York returned to his theatrical roots in the 1979 Broadway production of “Bent,” where he succeeded Richard Gere in the lead role of Max, a homosexual concentration camp inmate who pretends to be Jewish. That same year he produced his first movie, a slow-moving adaptation of Erskine Childer’s prototypical spy thriller, “The Riddle of the Sands” (1979).
Heading into the 1980s, Michael York attempted his first stage musical, “The Little Prince,” which failed miserably during its Broadway previews and led to his decision to return to the comfort of the small screen. York proved he could still be a dashing and stalwart swashbuckler in “The Master of Ballantrae” (CBS, 1984) and earned a Daytime Emmy nomination for the ABC Afterschool Special, “Are You My Mother?” He next joined the cast of the long-running primetime serial “Knot’s Landing” (CBS, 1979-1993) for the 1987-88 season, playing the love interest to Donna Mills. In the 1990s, York continued to work on the small screen with episodes of popular shows like “Babylon 5” (TNT, 1993-98) and the time travel adventure “Sliders” (Fox, 1995-99), while tackling prominent roles in TV movies like “Not of This Earth” (Showtime, 1995), “Dark Planet” (Syfy, 1997), “The Ripper” (Starz, 1997) and “A Knight in Camelot” (1998). Of course, York continued making big screen appearances, playing the prime and proper head of British intelligence, Basil Exposition, in the Mike Myers franchise “Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery” (1997), a role he reprised in “Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me” (1999) and “Austin Powers: Goldmember” (2002).
Finding a new audience, York played media mogul Stone Alexander in the religious-themed “The Omega Code” (1999) and its sequel “Megiddo: Omega Code 2” (2001) – two films that were not theatrical blockbusters, but nevertheless performed extremely well in their niche market. Meanwhile, York’s highly distinctive voice made him perfect for recording audio books, in which he was credited with over 70 productions, such as The Book of Psalms, Carl Jung’sMemories, Dreams, Reflections, Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat, and his own children’s book, The Magic Paw Paw.
Of course, York also voiced numerous characters on screen, from Murdstone in “Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield” (NBC, 1993), King Sarastro in “The Magic Flute” (ABC, 1994) and Kanto on “Superman” (ABC, 1996-99) to The King in “A Monkey’s Tale” (2001) and Prime #1 in “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” (2009).
In live action, he appeared in episodes of “The Gilmore Girls” (The WB, 2000-07) and “How I Met Your Mother” (CBS, 2005- ), before joining Rutger Hauer and Charlotte Rampling for the Polish-made religious drama “The Mill and the Cross” (2011). The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
Jane Wyman won an Oscar in 1948 for her performance in “Johnny Belinda”. She had spent a long time in small parts in movies and htis film was one of her first starring parts. She had a good ten years as a major leading lady. She was retired for a number of yearswhen she made it big again in the 1980’s with the success of the television series “Falcoln Crest” where she played the matriarch Angela Channing. When the series ended she retired again. She died at the age of 90 in 2007. Jane Wyman was the first wife of Ronald Reagan. Her biography on IMDB can be found here.
Jane Wyman obituary in “The Independent”.
Her “Independent” obituary:
The Oscar-winning actress Jane Wyman, who married the future US president Ronald Reagan when he was still an actor, was a prime example of a film star who paid her dues in the days of the studio system. As a contract player at Warner Bros, she appeared in more than 40 films before achieving star billing, two years after which she won an Academy Award for her moving portrayal of a deaf mute in Johnny Belinda (1948), which heralded a long career as a major star. Best remembered for films in which she suffered nobly, she also shone in comedy, and she could sing too – with Bing Crosby she introduced the Oscar-winning song “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening”. The director Alexander Hall said, “That gal can do anything she sets her mind to; she is one of the most creatively versatile performers the screen has ever boasted.”
A new generation acclaimed her as the matriarch of the television series Falcon Crest. Her place in history is assured, since Reagan was the first US President to have an ex-wife, and though neither liked to talk about their marriage, many contend that he would never have become President had she not left him. “I was divorced in the sense that the decision was made by somebody else,” he once said.
Wyman’s early life is somewhat contentious. Records would indicate that she was born Sarah Jane Mayfield, daughter of Manning J. Mayfield, a labourer at a food company, and Gladdys Hope Christian, in St Joseph, Missouri, in 1917. Her parents, who married in 1916, were divorced in 1921, and Manning died the following year. Gladdys then gave her daughter into the care of Richard Fulks and his German-born wife, the former Emma Reiss. There seems to have been no formal adoption or name change, but when the child was registered for first grade at the Noyes School in St Joseph, Emma listed her name as “Sarah Jane Fulks”.
Wyman later revealed that she loathed school, but her spirited response to dance classes prompted Mrs Fulks to take her to Hollywood at the age of eight, but without success. “I was one of those blonde curly-haired kids and my mother thought I was destined for the movies,” she recalled. The couple returned home, and Jane later reflected, “I was raised with such strict discipline that it was years before I could reason myself out of the bitterness I brought from my childhood.”
She worked as a switchboard operator, waitress and manicurist before trying Hollywood again – she now had a contact, since her dancing instructor in Missouri was the father of the leading film choreographer Leroy Prinz, who gave her a spot in Busby Berkeley’s The Kid from Spain (1932). For the next four years, she toiled in the chorus, occasionally getting a line of dialogue, and she can be spotted in College Rhythm (1934), Rumba (1935), King of Burlesque (1935) and Anything Goes (1936). Finally, she won a contract with Warners in 1936, on the recommendation of the agent and actor William Demarest. The studio is often credited with naming her “Jane Wyman”, but some sources aver that the actress was briefly married in 1931 to a student named Eugene Wyman, while another explanation is that Mrs Fulks had been married before, and her first husband’s name was M.F. Weyman.
Warners put Wyman to work with a string of bit parts – wise-cracking girl friends, telephonists, secretaries, chorus girls – that would lead to starring roles in “B” movies with, it seemed, little chance of rising higher, though Dick Powell, who starred in three films that featured Wyman, stated, “Janie had something you couldn’t learn – presence.” The director William Keighley reflected, “I was surprised big things didn’t happen for the Wyman girl a lot faster than they did.” William Demarest was to say of Wyman’s lifestyle during those years, “She couldn’t keep still for a second, loved nightclubs, dancing, singing with her friends. ‘There’s a lot of living to be done, and I’m going to do it,’ she’d say.” Her penchant for elaborate clothes and costume jewellery prompted gossip columnist Louella Parsons to call her “a walking Christmas tree”. In 1937 Wyman married Myron Futterman, a dress manufacturer and divorcee with a teenage daughter, but the marriage lasted only a year.
Wyman was given her first leading role in a “B” movie titled Public Wedding (1937), and around this time she met a new contract player, the former radio sports announcer Ronald Reagan. She confessed later that she was attracted to the actor and flirted with him, but he would not consider a relationship because, although separated, she was still married. Demarest said, “She was far more worldly and experienced than he was, although she was three years his junior. I think Ronnie at first was somewhat bewildered by her fast come-on; then he started to like it, then her, and then he fell in love.”
Their relationship flourished during the shooting of William Keighley’s Brother Rat (1938), in which they played a marine cadet and his sweetheart. Wyman and Reagan were total opposites. He was an outdoor enthusiast and an ardent Democrat who was soon involved in the Screen Actors Guild, fighting for the rights of contract players. Wyman was apolitical, stating, “When I first met Ronnie I was a nightclub girl. I just had to go dancing and dining every night to be happy.”
By the time Reagan proposed to her – on the set of a sequel, Brother Rat and a Baby (1940) – Wyman had developed some interest in politics and athletics, and had even taken up golf, an enthusiasm she retained for the rest of her life. Meanwhile she had supported Alice Faye in Tailspin (1939) and starred as resourceful reporter Torchy Blane in Torchy Plays with Dynamite (1939).
Wyman and Reagan were wed in 1940. Their daughter, Maureen, was born in 1941, and in 1945 they adopted a baby boy, Michael. While Reagan’s career seemed to be going upwards, Wyman’s followed its familiar pattern. “I’m queen of the sub-plots,” she confessed. “For years I’ve been the leading lady’s confidante, adviser, pal, sister, severest critic.”
Drafted when the United States entered the Second World War, Reagan was stationed with an army film unit in Culver City, where he was a personnel officer when not acting in training films. Wyman toured military camps, using a talent for singing that she had rarely displayed on screen. Knowing that the studio had purchased the rights to the life story of torch singer Helen Morgan, Wyman campaigned for the role but was instead cast in support of Ann Sheridan in The Doughgirls (1944). Sheridan had become one of her closest friends, and commented, “Jane used to tell me that Ronnie was such a talker that he even made speeches in his sleep.”
Wyman’s career received a boost when Billy Wilder asked her to read the screenplay he and Charles Brackett had fashioned from Charles Jackson’s novel about alcoholism, The Lost Weekend, to be filmed for Paramount. She said, “I was so conditioned to think of myself as a comedienne, I was completely floored when Billy said he wanted me for the part of girlfriend to the hero.” Brackett said, “We wanted a girl with a gift for life. We needed some gusto in the picture.” (He omitted to tell Wyman that both Katharine Hepburn and Jean Arthur had turned down the role.)
Wilder and Brackett’s adaptation omitted the hero’s latent homosexuality, enlarged the part of the girl, and added an optimistic ending, but otherwise it was an uncompromising and brilliant study of a hopeless alcoholic (an Oscar-winning Ray Milland), with Wyman splendid as his down-to-earth sweetheart. “It changed my whole life,” said Wyman, though she was still under-rated by her own studio and found herself cast as a chirpy chorus girl in a wildly inaccurate biography of Cole Porter, Night and Day (1946).
Though release of The Lost Weekend was delayed for nearly a year – the studio had qualms about it, and the liquor industry offered them $5m to destroy the negative – trade insiders had seen it, and MGM negotiated to borrow Wyman for their screen version of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about a boy’s love for a fawn, The Yearling. Its star Gregory Peck, who personally acted with Wyman in her test, told her afterwards, “You were wonderful”, to which she replied, “Good God, don’t act so surprised.” When The Lost Weekend opened, critics displayed similar wonder. The World-Telegram referred to her “unsuspected talent” and The New York Times stated, “Jane Wyman assumes with great authority a different role.”
Her part in The Yearling (1947) as careworn Ma Baxter, who toils in the backwoods of 1870 Florida, required delicate shading in her portrayal of a mother who must have her son’s beloved fawn killed because it is eating their crops. Wyman’s performance was described by Life magazine as “beyond reproach”. Wyman won an Oscar nomination and, though she lost to Olivia De Havilland in To Each His Own, her status as a star was now established, and she was soon to play the part for which many best remember her.
The producer Jerry Wald had persuaded Warners to buy the rights to a Broadway hit of 1940, Johnny Belinda, despite the studio’s misgivings about a story in which a deaf mute is raped, has a child, then kills the father when he tries to take it from her. (Shortly before shooting commenced in late 1947, Wyman’s second child, a daughter, had died a few hours after her premature birth.) Wyman learned sign language and lip reading for the film, but later recalled, “Something was missing. Suddenly I realised what was wrong. I could hear.”
She and the director Jean Negulesco decided that her ears should be blocked with wax to cut out all noise except percussion. Wyman’s performance was beautifully modulated, avoided bathos, and won her a deserved Oscar against formidable competition (Ingrid Bergman, Barbara Stanwyck, Olivia De Havilland and Irene Dunne). Her acceptance speech was one of the briefest and most effective in Oscar’s history: “I accept this award very gratefully – for keeping my mouth shut for once. I think I’ll do it again.”
She was accompanied to the ceremony by the actor Lew Ayres, who was rumoured to have consoled her during the shooting because of her marital problems. Reagan’s political work and fervent campaigning for President Truman had strained their relationship, but when Wyman announced to the press, “We’re through. We’re finished. And it’s all my fault”, she was making it clear that it was her own decision to end the marriage. “I love Jane,” said Reagan, “and I know she loves me. I don’t know what this is all about and I don’t know why Jane has done it.”
Shortly afterwards, Reagan was in London filming The Hasty Heart, and his co-star Patricia Neal later commented, “Although I was a young, pretty girl, he never made a pass at me. Of course there were splendid reasons. I was wildly in love with Gary Cooper and he was still in love with Jane Wyman.” The couple’s divorce became final in July 1949. Wyman refused throughout her life to talk of their marriage or divorce, claiming that it was “bad taste” to discuss such matters.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright (1950) took Wyman to London where she renewed a friendship with Laurence Olivier, who had won his Oscar for Hamlet on the same night she won hers. Hitchcock had personally asked for Wyman, but he was later to accuse her of getting out of character by refusing to look too drab compared to her glamorous co-star, Marlene Dietrich. The film’s lukewarm reviews, though, were the fault of the director, who made a rare error of judgement by opening the mystery with Wyman’s boyfriend (Richard Todd) relating an incident told in flashback (in an era when flashbacks were taken literally) though in fact he is lying. Critics were incensed by the perceived “cheating”, and the film proved a box-office disappointment.
The Glass Menagerie (1950), based on Tennessee Williams’ lyrical play, also proved disappointing, though Wyman gave what The New York Times called a “beautifully sensitive” portrayal of Laura, a crippled girl who finds solace from loneliness in her collection of glass figurines.
In 1952 Wyman had two contrasting box-office hits. The first was Frank Capra’s musical comedy, Here Comes the Groom, in which Wyman was teamed with her singing idol, Bing Crosby. The pair had relaxed fun with a novelty number, “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening”, which Hoagy Carmichael and Johnny Mercer had written for an unrealised Betty Hutton musical based on the life of Mabel Normand. It was a complicated production number that took the couple through several sets as they sang, and Capra decided to record the song live, with tiny radios in the stars’ ears so that they could hear the orchestra. The song won an Oscar, the stars’ recording was a big hit, and Decca signed Wyman to a recording contract. Her co-star Franchot Tone said, ‘Everybody got caught up in the fun Bing and Jane were obviously having together.’
The producer Jerry Wald had bought the rights to a French film hit, Le Voile Bleu (1947), hoping to tempt Greta Garbo out of retirement to play a woman who loses her husband and child in the First World Warand devotes her life to being governess to other people’s children. When Garbo refused, he asked Wyman to take the role, in which the woman goes from home to home until, old and working as a janitor, she is given a surprise party attended by all her former progeny. It was blatantly manipulative, but Wyman brought dignity and conviction to her part. Variety called it “a personal triumph”, and The Blue Veil won Wyman her third Oscar nomination, though she was up against two powerhouse performances, Katharine Hepburn’s in The African Queen, and Vivien Leigh’s (the winner) for A Streetcar Named Desire.
The success of both Here Comes the Groom and The Blue Veil put Wyman into the year’s top ten box-office draws, and she won two Golden Globe awards – as best actress, for The Blue Veil and as “World Film Favourite Actress of the year”. Wyman rejoined Crosby to take a role planned for Judy Garland (who was not fit enough to do it) in Just for You (1952). Its brightest spot was another catchy duet with Crosby. Wyman was reunited with Ray Milland for Let’s Do It Again (1952), a musical remake of a comedy classic, The Awful Truth. Milland, usually sparing with compliments, said of Wyman, “She could sing and dance with the best of them and her comedy timing was top-notch. She inspired everyone around her to give their best, and she was very down-to-earth and democratic.”
Making the film, Wyman met Fred Karger, an assistant to the studio’s music director, Morris Stoloff, and before shooting finished, Karger had become Wyman’s husband. They were divorced in 1955, remarried in 1961, and divorced again in 1965.
Wyman had to go from young woman to old lady again in Robert Wise’s So Big (1953), the third screen version of Edna Ferber’s novel. It proved popular, but not as much as her next film, another property filmed twice before, Magnificent Obsession (1954). In this, the first of a string of lush melodramas produced by Ross Hunter, wastrel Rock Hudson indirectly causes both the death of Wyman’s doctor husband and then Wyman’s blindness. Reformed, he becomes a surgeon and restores Wyman’s sight for a tearful climax. Most critics directed any praise they offered to Wyman’s sincere underplaying, which won her a fourth Oscar nomination (she lost to Grace Kelly in The Country Girl).
Directed by Douglas Sirk, the film was a huge money-maker, though it is less well regarded today than another film with the same production team and stars, All That Heaven Allows (1955). The latter, in which a widow falls in love with her young gardener to the horror of her selfish children and her conformist friends, was dismissed by most critics as just another piece of glossy kitsch, but is now perceived as a cuttingly perceptive attack on middle-class hypocrisy and the expectation that ageing widows should need nothing more from life than the country club and a TV set.
It was not entirely original (My Reputation had tackled a similar subject a decade earlier) but Sirk’s subversion of his material and use of colour made his film more than just a star vehicle. (In a celebrated shot, he has Wyman’s face reflected in the glass screen of the television to symbolise her entrapment.) Fassbinder’s Fear Eats the Soul (1974) was inspired by the film, though his ending was much bleaker.
In 1955, after starring with Van Johnson in the sentimental Miracle in the Rain, Wyman refused the role of Gary Cooper’s wife in Friendly Persuasion, and instead became president of the company that produced the television anthology series Fireside Theater. Rechristened The Jane Wyman Theater, it featured a variety of plays, with Wyman starring in around a third of each season’s 34 half-hour episodes, and ran until 1959. For the next 22 years, she made occasional guest appearances in TV shows such as Wagon Train and The Love Boat, and played only four more film roles, notably as Hayley Mills’ stern Aunt Polly in Pollyanna (1960). Semi-retired, she enjoyed painting, golf and seeing her children.
Her career, it seemed, was virtually over when in 1981, at the age of 64, she was asked to star as Angela Channing, wine tycoon, in the television series Falcon Crest. The “pilot” show left her with stringent demands. “Not only was Angela too mean and vicious, but she was just plain boring. I wanted her to be an interesting character.” When the former superstar Lana Turner joined the show as Wyman’s sister-in-law, Turner’s entourage and star demands did not sit well with Wyman, who displayed her power by having Turner’s character killed off after one season. Falcon Crest ran until 1990, and by the end of the show’s fifth season, the already-wealthy Wyman was estimated to be earning $3m a year (10 times Reagan’s salary).
When Reagan died in 2004, Wyman broke her long silence to say, “America has lost a great President and a great, kind and gentle man.”
Tom Vallance
The above “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.
