Oscar Profile #43: Fay Bainter

Fay Bainter was unique among the stage trained actresses who excelled at character roles on screen in the 1930s and 40s. While other prolific performers of the day such as Edna May Oliver, Beulah Bondi and Spring Byington had always been character players, Bainter was a theatrical star of the first magnitude. Her stage roles ranged from the dissatisfied wife opposite Walter Huston in the original 1934 Broadway production of Dodsworth to Eugene O’Neill’s drug addicted Mary Tyrone in the acclaimed 1958 National Touring Company production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night.

Born December 7, 1893 in Los Angeles, California, she was only four years old when she joined the Morosco Stock Company of Los Angeles in 1898 and eighteen when she made her Broadway debut in The Rose of Panama in 1912. Six years later she became a major star with Brodway’s East Is West. More successes followed including her highly lauded portrayal of Fran Dodsworth in Dodsworth. That same year, 1934, she accepted her first film role as Lionel Barrymore’s wife in This Side of Heaven. She missed out on the screen version of Dodsworth when the then better known Ruth Chatterton was cast opposite Walter Huston instead. She rebounded quickly, though, with two highly regarded supporting performances in 1937 films as Katharine Hepburn’s excitable sister in Quality Street and as the put upon daughter-in-law in Make Way for Tomorrow.

With her dual Oscar nominations for 1938’s White Banners and Jezebel, she became the first of ten performers thus far to be nominated in two acting categories in the same year and set the precedent of winning in the supporting category while losing in the lead one.

Although she had starring roles in 1942’s The War Against Mrs. Hadley and Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, she spent most of the 1940s playing the usually drab mother of the star, with Katharine Hepburn’s sophisticated aunt in Woman of the Year a notable exception.

She was William Holden’s mother in Our Town; Mickey Rooney’s in The Human Comedy; Jeanne Crain’s in State Fair and Danny Kaye’s in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty among many others.

From 1954 on she was mostly seen in guest starring roles on TV. The 1958 touring version of Long Day’s Journey Into Night brought her renewed acclaim and her final film, 1961’s The Children’s Hour presented her with her strongest screen character in many years. It earned her a third Oscar nomination.

Her husband from 1921 until his death in 1964 was Reginald Venable, a Lt. Commander in the U.S. Navy. Bainter, who died of pneumonia in 1968 at 74 is buried beside him at Arlington National Cemetery.

ESSENTIAL FILMS

MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW (1937), directed by Leo McCarey

The focus in McCarey’s classic is on the elderly couple played by Beulah Bondi and Victor Moore, but the film doesn’t take sides in this relationship drama in which no one has it particularly good. Bainter earns our sympathy as the daughter-in-law who tiptoes around her sweet but meddlesome mother-in-law (Bondi) until she finally explodes. It’s heartbreaking watching her sail into Bondi, but it’s also understandable thanks to the interplay of these two great actresses who were re-united three years later for the screen version of Our Town in which Bainter was Mrs. Gibbs and Bondi Mrs. Webb.

WHITE BANNERS (1938), directed by Edmund Goulding

Bainter is at her best in this rarely screened gem in which she plays a homeless woman who takes a job as housekeeper and cook in Claude Rains’ home to be near the son she gave up for adoption years earlier. Jackie Cooper as the son and Bonita Granville as Rains’ daughter also give memorable performances, but Bainter is the commanding presencer here in a performance that clearly shows that her supporting Oscar for the same year’s Jezebel was very much a consolation prize.

THE WAR AGAINST MRS. HADLEY (1942), directed by Harold S. Bucquet

The usually sympathetic Bainter plays against type here as a widowed Washington D.C. socialite unaffected by world events, who refuses to give into the war effort until events in the lives of her children force her to take heed. Bainter’s character is seen celebrating her birthday on Pearl Harbor Day, which was coincidentally Navy wife Bainter’s own birthday. Edward Arnold, Richard Ney, Jean Rogers, Van Johnson, Sara Allgood and Spring Byington provide strong support.

STATE FAIR (1945), directed by Walter Lang

Many prefer the straight 1933 version with Will Rogers and Janet Gaynor, but this first of two musical versions featuring Rodgers & Hammerstein’s only screen score provides a charm of its own. Much of the charm revolves around the music, which includes such treasures as the Oscar winning “It Might As Well Be Spring” and the infectious “It’s a Grand Night for Singing”. Still, Bainter’s warmth as Jeanne Crain and Dick Haymes’ mother adds something intangible to the film that is lacking in Dresser’s more exasperated playing in the earlier version and Alice Faye’s faded glamour take on the character in the later version.

THE CHILDREN’S HOUR (1961), directed by William Wyler

Wyler’s remake of his own 1936 version of Lillian Hellman’s play, re-titled These Three, restores Hellman’s theme of lesbianism absent from the earlier version. Audrey Hepburn, Shirley MacLaine and James Garner have the starring roles as the two teachers and fiancé of one of them whose lives are ruined by a student’s lies. Miriam Hopkins plays the aunt of the character she played in the earlier version with Merle Oberon and Joel McCrea, played here by MacLaine. Bainter plays the grandmother of the brat. Basically an unsympathetic character, the woman’s remorse at what she has done is brilliantly conveyed by Bainter in one of the film’s most memorable scenes.