Jean Arthur
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Jean Arthur | |
 |
|
| Birth name | Gladys Georgianna Greene |
| Born | October 17, 1900 Plattsburgh, New York, USA |
| Died | June 19, 1991 (aged 90) |
| Spouse(s) | Julian Anker (1928) (divorced after one day) Frank Ross Jr. (1932-1949) |
Jean Arthur (October 17, 1900 – June 19, 1991) was an American actress. She was one of Hollywood's favorite screen comediennes.
Contents |
[edit] Early life
Arthur was born Gladys Georgianna Greene in Plattsburgh, New York to Johanna Augusta Nelson and Hubert Sydney Greene. She lived in Westbrook, Maine from 1908 to 1915 while her father worked at Lamson Studios in Portland, Maine as a photographer. Her maternal grandparents were immigrants from Norway.[1] She allegedly took her stage name from two of her greatest heroes, Joan of Arc (Jeanne d'Arc) and King Arthur.
[edit] Career
After a brief time on the New York stage, Arthur debuted in the silent film Cameo Kirby (1923), and made a few silent westerns and short comedies (all low-budget), although it was her distinctive nasal voice -- in addition to some much needed stage training -- that eventually made her a star in the talkies. She wore her natural brunette hair color throughout the silent film portion of her career, then began bleaching her hair blonde shortly after she started making talkies. She was selected as one of the WAMPAS Baby Stars in 1929. In 1935 -- at age 34 -- she starred opposite Edward G. Robinson in the gangster farce The Whole Town's Talking, and her popularity began to rise.
And costarring in three celebrated Frank Capra films: it was her role opposite Gary Cooper in 1936 in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town that made her a star, You Can't Take It with You (1938) and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington in 1939 both with James Stewart. She also was considered for the role of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind.
She continued her fame by starring classics such as 1942's The Talk of the Town, and again in 1943 in The More the Merrier, for which she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress. 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 (Ronald Colman, Cary Grant) 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. Director George Stevens famously called her "one of the greatest comediennes the screen has ever seen" while Frank Capra credited her as "my favorite actress".
[edit] Retirement
Never particularly happy being famous or a film star, 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!". After retiring, she taught drama at Vassar College.
She turned down virtually all film offers, the two exceptions being Billy Wilder's A Foreign Affair (1948) and the Western classic Shane (1953), which turned out to be the biggest box-office hit of her film career. The latter was her final film, made after a five year absence from the screen. Her acting work from the 1950s on was intermittent, somewhat curtailed by Arthur's longstanding shyness and discomfort about her chosen profession.[2] In the years between these films, Arthur scored a major triumph on Broadway starring in a stage revival of Peter Pan playing the Eternal Boy when she was almost fifty. She did occasional stage work.
She had missed out on another triumph a few years before when she was cast in the lead of the 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.
According to John Oller's biography Jean Arthur: The Actress Nobody Knew (1997), Arthur was a shy person who came to loathe making movies, having developed a kind of stage fright that made acting in movies agony for her. She returned to acting, albeit briefly, in a short-lived comedy, The Jean Arthur Show',' on CBS in the 1966-67 season.
In 1968, 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 -- partly because of her well-known stage fright and partly because the play was shaping up to be a fiasco.
She turned down the role of the lady missionary in Lost Horizon (1973), the unsuccessful musical remake of the 1937 classic of the same name. At the Yale Law School Film Society weekend with Frank Capra in 1972, she attended a small afternoon symposium at Capra's invitation. Capra 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.
Arthur is portrayed by Vicki Belmonte in TV film The Scarlett O'Hara War (1980).
[edit] Marriages
- Photographer Julian Anker in 1928, annulled after one day.
- Producer Frank Ross Jr. from 1932-49, divorced
- Arthur did not have any children.
[edit] Death
Jean Arthur died from heart failure in 1991. 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.
Department of Strange Coincidences: Jean Arthur's former spouse, producer Frank Ross, next married the actress Joan Caulfield. On the day following Caulfield's death on 18 June 1991, Arthur died.
[edit] Filmography
|
|
[edit] Quotes
- "It's a strenuous job every day of your life to live up to the way you look on the screen."
- "I guess I became an actress because I didn't want to be myself."
- "I am not an adult, that's my explanation of myself. Except when I am working on a set, I have all the inhibitions and shyness of the bashful, backward child...Unless I have something very much in common with a person, I am lost. I am swallowed up in my own silence."
- "The fact that I did not marry George Bernard Shaw is the only real disappointment I've had."
- [On Hollywood] "I hated the place - not the work, but the lack of privacy, those terrible prying fan magazine writers and all the surrounding exploitation."
- "If people don't like your work, all the still pictures in the world can't help you and nothing written about you, even oceans of it, will make you popular."
- (on doing interviews) "Quite frankly, I'd rather have my throat slit."
- "I bumped into every kind of disappointment, and was frustrated at every turn. Roles promised me were given to other players, pictures that offered me a chance were shelved, no one was particularly interested in me, and I had not developed a strength of personality to make anyone believe I had special talents. I wanted so desperately to succeed that I drove myself relentlessly, taking no time off for pleasures, or for friendships - yet aiming at the stars, I was still floundering."
- "First I played ingenues and Western heroines; then I played Western heroines and ingenues. That diet of roles became as monotonous as a diet of spinach. The studio wouldn't trust me with any other kind of role, because I had no experience in any other kind. And I didn't see how I was ever going to acquire any other experience if I couldn't get any other kind of role. It was a vicious circle."
- "It's hardly fair for women to do the same things at the same hours every day of their lives, while men have new experiences, meet new people every day. I felt that way as a little girl, with two older brothers around the house. It seemed to me that they led adventurous lives, compared with mine. I felt cheated and frustrated. I became a tomboy in self-defense. I decided that I was going to do things that were exciting, or at least interesting."
- [speaking in in the 1930s] "I've never had a single close intimate girl friend in all my life. I never had a chum to whom I could confide my secrets. I suppose that accounts for the fact that now it is so painfully difficult for me to open my heart and confide in people who are, so often, almost strangers. You have to learn so very young to open your heart."
- [on her early acting days] "My very 'naturalness' was my undoing. I had to learn that to appear natural on the screen requires a vast amount of training, that is the test of an actors art. It would be more spectacular if I could say that out of the hurt and humiliation of that failure was born a determination to success, to prove I had the makings of an actress. But it wouldn't be true. That urge came later."
[edit] Footnotes
[edit] External links
- Jean Arthur at the Internet Movie Database
- 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
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| NAME | Arthur, Jean |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Greene, Gladys Georgianna |
| SHORT DESCRIPTION | actress |
| DATE OF BIRTH | October 17, 1900 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Plattsburgh, New York |
| DATE OF DEATH | June 19, 1991 |
| PLACE OF DEATH | Carmel-by-the-Sea, California |
