Oscar Profile #59: Mary Astor

Director Lindsay Anderson, who never had the opportunity to work with Mary Astor, wrote in Sight and Sound in 1990, “… when two or three who love the cinema are gathered together, the name of Mary Astor always comes up, and everybody agrees that she was an actress of special attraction, whose qualities of depth and reality always seemed to illuminate the parts she played.”

Truer words were never written. If there was ever an Oscar winning actress who deserved more than the one measly nomination (albeit win) she received during her long and celebrated career, Astor was that actress.

Born May 3, 1906 in Quincy, Illinois to a German immigrant father and American mother of Portuguese and Irish ancestry, her parents pushed their beautiful daughter into entering numerous beauty contests as a child. Spotted by a talent scout in one of the contests when she was 14, she was brought to Hollywood and given her first role. By 17, already a well-known screen star, she became a major player opposite John Barrymore in Beau Brummel while having an affair with him off-screen. Two years and fourteen films later, the affair having long ended, she again starred opposite Barrymore in Don Juan.

Astor made headlines in 1925 when at 19 she climbed out of her bedroom window to escape her tyrannical father who had been controlling her money, giving her only a $5 per week allowance from her reputed $2,500 per week salary. Her problems with her parents weren’t resolved until 1932, when at 26, and then into her second marriage, she gained control over her money after agreeing in court to pay her parents $100 per month for life.

Astor was one of the silent stars who easily made the transition to talkies, receiving acclaim for her portrayals of Ann Harding’s diffident sister in 1930’s Holiday and the other woman in 1932’s Red Dust opposite Jean Harlow and Clark Gable.

Married to director Kenenth Hawks (Howard’s brother) in 1928, she was devastated by his death in a plane crash in January, 1930. A year and a half later she married Dr. Franklyn Thorpe, the psychiatrist who had treated her for depression after Hawks’ death. Their contentious divorce in 1935 made headlines as her husband’s lawyer threatened to enter into evidence Astor’s explicit diary documenting her affair with writer George S. Kaufman. The notoriety caused the bluenoses to insist producer Samuel Goldwyn fire her from her latest film, William Wyler’s Dodsworth as a sympathetic divorcee. Goldwyn refused and when the film came out, audiences cheered her entrance.

Married to film editor Manuel del Campo from 1937 to 1942, she was now in top demand. She was unforgettable in two major films of 1937, John Cromwell’s The Prisoner of Zenda and John Ford’s The Hurricane and showed her comic genius in Mitchell Leisen’s Midnight in 1939. In 1941, she made movie history opposite Humphrey Bogart in John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon and stole Edmund Goulding’s The Great Lie from Bette Davis, winning her sole Oscar for playing Davis’ nemesis, a self-absorbed concert pianist.

Reunited with Bogart and Huston for 1942’s Across the Pacific, she reunited with Midnight co-star Claudette Colbert for Preston Sturgess’ even more uproarious 1942 film, The Palm Beach Story. She then when too soon into playing middle-aged mothers, playing the mother of grown daughters Kathryn Grayson in George Sidney’s 1943 film, Thousands Cheers and Judy Garland in Vincente Minnelli’s 1944 classic, Meet Me in St. Louis.

In mostly forgettable roles for the remainder of the 1940s, she occasionally had a role that made critics and audiences sit up and take notice such as the world-weary prostitute in Fred Zinnemann’s 1948 film, Act of Violence and Marmee in Mervyn LeRoy’s 1949 film of Little Women.

Much on TV in the 1950s and early 1960s, her occasional films of this period were all causes for celebration. She was Robert Wagner’s dowdy mother in 1956’s A Kiss Before Dying; John Saxon’s charming mother in 1958’s This Happy Feeling; June Allyson’s overbearing mother-in-law in 1959’s A Stranger in My Arms; the town matriarch in 1961’s Return to Peyton Place and the widow of the murder victim in 1964’s Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte. After that she retired from acting, wrote two auto-biographies and five best-selling novels.

Mary Astor died in 1987 at 81.

ESSENTIAL FILMS

DODSWORTH (1936), directed by William Wyler

One of the most acclaimed films of the 1930s, Walter Huston had one of the best roles of his career recreating his Broadway triumph as the middle-aged retired industrialist who tries in vain to rekindle his love for his social climbing wife. Ruth Chatterton, in the role played on Broadway by Fay Bainter, played against type to great effect as the vain, foolish wife and Mary Astor was brought in to play the part of the comforting divorcee who becomes his second chance. That role was played on stage by Huston’s wife, Nenitta (Nan) Sutherland.

The film, which won an Oscar for Best Art Direction, had been nominated for seven Oscars including Best Picture, director, Actor and Supporting Actress, but that last nod for Maria Ouspenskaya who has one scene as an impoverished countess who puts Chatterton in her place, not Astor who should have been singled out for classy and classic performance. Audiences still cheer her unforgettable last scene.

THE HURRICANE (1937), directed by John Ford

Based on the novel by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall, who wrote Mutiny on the Bounty, this classic actioner was almost as successful as the former film, which won 1935’s Best Picture Oscar.

Coming two years before the first Oscar was awarded for Visual Effects, the film did win for Best Sound. It had also been nominated for Best Score and Supporting Actor Thomas Mitchell, but again nothing for Astor, whose luminous performance was perhaps the film’s best.

Jon Hall, who never had quite as good a role, starred as the native islander whose wrongful prison sentence sets up the film’s main storyline. Hall, whose mother was Tahitian, was the nephew of co-author James Norman Hall, whose son, and Jon Hall’s cousin, was Oscar winning cinematographer Conrad Hall. Ben Chapman, a cousin on his mother side, was an actor whose most famous role was as The Creature from the Black Lagoon.

Thomas Mitchell was the island’s kindly doctor; C. Aubrey Smith, the kindly priest and Astor the kindly wife of stiff-necked governor Raymond Massey. The film’s lengthy climax involves a hurricane (more correctly called a typhoon in the Pacific), in which Hall saves Astor’s life.

THE PALM BEACH STORY (1942), directed by Preston Sturges

Astor is hilarious as a predatory female in Sturges’ peerless screwball comedy. Stunning, vivacious and so utterly charming as the other woman you kind of wish there could be two Joel McCreas so Claudette Colbert could have one and Astor could have one as well. Of course it would also be nice if there were two Claudette Colberts so that McCrea and Rudy Vallee, never so loose on film, could each have one. Hmmm, maybe they can!

A superb supporting cast including Rudy Vallee, Sig Arno, Robert Warwick and William Demarest adds to the merriment.

A STRANGER IN MY ARMS (1959) , directed by Helmut Kautner

Astor is in her element as a wealthy, deluded matriarch trying to secure a Congressional Medal of Honor for her late son while controlling family members including daughter Sandra Dee and daughter-in-law June Allyson. The key to the woman’s ambitions is the son’s commanding officer played by Jeff chandler who has issues of his own.

This was one a handful of Hollywood films made by Kautner, one of the most important German directors of the post-war era.

RETURN TO PEYTON PLACE (1961) , directed by Jose Ferrer

This sequel to the 1957 Oscar nominated film is one of those films that is so bad it’s good, but it’s only good when Astor is on screen. Too much of the film revolves around a pointless romance between Carol Lynley and Jeff Chandler, but when Astor is on screen, wow! This is a performance that has to be seen to be believed. The self-appointed queen of the town, the film ends with Astor getting her come-uppance but before that glorious moment she is up to no good from the moment we first see her, even lowering herself to listen at the bedroom door of son and his new wife. Implied incest was never made so clear in a Production code era Hollywood film.