Jean Arthur
Jean Arthur | |
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| File:Jean Arthur.jpg | |
| Born | Gladys Georgianna Greene |
| Spouse(s) | Julian Anker (1928) (divorced after one day) Frank Ross Jr. (1932-1949) |
Jean Arthur (October 17, 1900 – June 19, 1991) was an Oscar-nominated American actress and a major film star in the 1930s and 1940s. She was one of Hollywood's favorite screen comediennes.
Early life
Arthur was born Gladys Georgianna Greene in Plattsburgh, New York to Johanna Augusta Nelson and Hubert Sidney Greene. She lived off and on in Westbrook, Maine from 1908 to 1915 while her father worked at Lamson Studios in Portland, Maine as a photographer. The product of a nomadic childhood, Arthur also lived at times in Jacksonville, Florida; Schenectady, New York; and, during a portion of her high school years, in the Washington Heights neighborhood of upper Manhattan. She came from a family of three older brothers. Her maternal grandparents were immigrants from Norway[1] who settled in the American West. She allegedly took her stage name from two of her greatest heroes, Joan of Arc (Jeanne d'Arc) and King Arthur.
Film career
Discovered by Fox Film Studios while she was doing commercial modeling in New York City in the early 1920s, Arthur debuted in the silent film Cameo Kirby (1923), directed by John Ford, and made a few silent westerns and short comedies (all low-budget). She was selected as one of the WAMPAS Baby Stars in 1929, but her career became stuck in ingenue roles. It was her distinctive, throaty voice – in addition to some stage training on Broadway in the early 1930s that eventually made her a star in the talkies. In 1935, at age 34, she starred opposite Edward G. Robinson in the gangster farce The Whole Town's Talking, also directed by Ford, and her popularity began to rise. By then her hair color, worn natural brunette throughout the silent film portion of her career, was bleached blonde and would stay that way.
Director Frank Capra spotted her in a daily rush [2] from the film Whirlpool in 1934 [3] and convinced Columbia Studios head Harry Cohn to sign her for his next film as a tough newspaperwoman who falls in love with a country bumpkin millionaire. Arthur is probably best known for costarring in three celebrated 1930s Capra films: her role opposite the millionaire bumpkin Gary Cooper in 1936 in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town made her a star, while her fame was cemented with You Can't Take It with You (1938) and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington in 1939 both with James Stewart. Also notably she was reteamed with Cooper in Cecil B. DeMille's The Plainsman (1936), and appeared in Mitchell Leisen's 1937 screwball comedy Easy Living opposite Ray Milland. So strong was her box office appeal by 1939 that she was one of four finalists that year for the role of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind; the film's producer, David O. Selznick, had briefly romanced Arthur in the late 1920s when they both were with Paramount Pictures.
She continued to advance her career by starring in films such as Howard Hawks' Only Angels Have Wings in 1939, with love interest Cary Grant, 1942's The Talk of the Town, directed by George Stevens (also with Grant), and again for Stevens in 1943's The More the Merrier, for which she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress (she lost to Jennifer Jones in The Song of Bernadette). As a result of being in the doghouse with studio boss Harry Cohn, her fee for starring in The Talk of the Town (1942) was only $50,000 while her male co-stars Grant and Ronald Colman received upwards of $100,000 each. Arthur remained Columbia's top star until the mid-1940s, when she left the studio and Rita Hayworth took over as the studio's reigning queen. Stevens famously called her "one of the greatest comediennes the screen has ever seen", while Capra credited her as "my favorite actress" [4].
Arthur "retired" when her contract with Columbia Pictures expired in 1944. She reportedly ran through the studio's streets, shouting "I'm free, I'm free!" For the next several years she turned down virtually all film offers, the two exceptions being Billy Wilder's A Foreign Affair (1948) and the Western Shane (1953), which turned out to be the biggest box-office hit of her film career. The latter was her final film.
Arthur's post-retirement work in theater was intermittent, somewhat curtailed by her longstanding shyness and discomfort about her chosen profession.[5] Capra claimed she vomited in her dressing room between scenes, yet emerged each time to perform a flawless take. According to John Oller's biography Jean Arthur: The Actress Nobody Knew (1997), Arthur developed a kind of stage fright punctuated with bouts of psychosomatic illnesses. A prime example was in 1945, when she was cast in the lead of the Garson Kanin play Born Yesterday. Her nerves and insecurity got the better of her and she left the production before it reached Broadway, opening the door for Judy Holliday to take the part for which she later won an Academy Award.
Arthur did score a major triumph on Broadway in 1950, starring in a stage revival of Peter Pan playing the Eternal Boy when she was almost 50. She tackled the role of her namesake, Joan of Arc, in a 1954 stage production of George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan, but she left the play after a nervous breakdown and battles with director Harold Clurman.
Retirement
In 1966, the extremely reclusive Arthur tentatively returned to show business as an attorney on a TV sitcom, The Jean Arthur Show, which was cancelled mid-season by CBS after only 11 episodes.
In 1967, she was coaxed back to Broadway to appear as a midwestern spinster who falls in with a group of hippies in the play The Freaking Out of Stephanie Blake. William Goldman, in his book The Season reconstructed the disastrous production, which eventually closed during previews when Arthur refused to go on.
Arthur next decided to teach drama, first at Vassar College and then the North Carolina School of the Arts. While living in North Carolina she made front page news by being arrested and tossed in jail for trespassing on a neighbor's property to console a dog she felt was being mistreated. An animal lover her entire life, Arthur said she trusted them more than people.
She turned down the role of the lady missionary in Lost Horizon (1973), the unsuccessful musical remake of the 1937 film of the same name. At the Yale Law School Film Society weekend with Capra in 1972, she attended a small afternoon symposium at his invitation. He urged her to stay for the screening that night, and assured her the audience would be delighted and overwhelmingly enthusiastic. She declined because, she said, she had to go home and feed her cats.
In 1975, the Broadway hit play First Monday in October, about the first female Supreme Court justice, was written especially with Arthur in mind, but once again, she succumbed to extreme stage fright and quit the production shortly into its out-of-town run in Cleveland. She then retired for good, retreating to her ocean home in Carmel, California, steadfastly refusing interviews until her resistance was broken down by the author of a book on her one-time director Capra (she once famously said that she’d rather have her throat slit than do an interview).
Arthur is portrayed by Vicki Belmonte in the TV film The Scarlett O'Hara War (1980).
Marriages
Her first marriage, to photographer Julian Anker in 1928, was annulled after one day. She married producer Frank Ross Jr. in 1932. They divorced in 1949. Arthur did not have any children.
Death and Legacy
Jean Arthur died from heart failure at the age of 90. Her ashes were scattered at sea near Carmel-by-the-Sea, California. She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6331 Hollywood Blvd. The Jean Arthur Atrium was her gift to the Monterey Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California.
Filmography
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References
- ^ http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~battle/celeb/arthur.htm
- ^ Capra 1971, p. 184.
- ^ Oller 1997, p. 84.
- ^ Capra 1971, p. 184-185.
- ^ TCM Movie Database
- Capra, Frank. Frank Capra, The Name Above the Title: An Autobiography. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1971. ISBN 0-30680-771-8.
- Oller, John. Jean Arthur: The Actress Nobody Knew. New York: Limelight Editions, 1997. ISBN 0-87910-278-0.
External links
- Jean Arthur at IMDb
- Jean Arthur at the TCM Movie Database
- Jean Arthur at the Internet Broadway Database
- Turner Classic Movies "Star of the Month" Profile
- Jean Arthur biographical sketch on Find-A-Grave
- Allmovie bio
- Lengthy article on Jean Arthur