Oscar Profile #12: Una O’Connor

Of all the many wonderful character actors and actresses with lengthy careers who somehow never managed to attract serious Oscar consideration, the indomitable Una O’Connor was perhaps the best.

Born in 1880 in Belfast, Ireland to a Catholic nationalist family, O’Connor’s early career was as a member of Dublin’s celebrated Abbey Theatre. She appeared on Broadway as early as 1911. She began her screen career in Alfred Hitchcock’s Murder! in 1930, but didn’t attain major success until Noel Coward chose her to play the maid whose fortunes rise as her employers’ decline in the 1933 Oscar winning film Cavalcade. Her portrayal of the screaming landlady in James Whale’s film of The Invisible Man later that year became one of her signature roles.

She was the comic relief as the slow-moving maid in Sidney Franklin’s The Barretts of Wimpole Street in 1934 and screamed for Whale again in 1935’s Bride of Frankenstein. That same year she had one of her best straight dramatic roles as the grieving mother in John Ford’s The Informer. It was a small but effective performance that never fails to move audiences to tears.

Perhaps the most widely seen of all her screen roles was that of Olivia de Havilland’s maid in 1938’s The Adventures of Robin Hood co-directed by Michael Curtiz and William Keighley, in which she was reunited with Herbert Mundin, her co-star from Cavalcade, who played her love interest.

O’Connor’s best screen role, however, was as Charles Laughton’s foolish mother in Jean Renoir’s under-appreciated 1943 masterpiece, This Land Is Mine, after which she retreated to playing mostly maids and cooks again. She was the cook who had to share Barbara Stanwyck’s kitchen with S.Z. “Cuddles” Sakall in Peter Godfrey’s 1945 comedy Christmas in Connecticut. That same year she was the convent cook and housekeeper to Ingrid Bergman and company in Leo McCarey’s The Bells of St. Mary’s.

She had a small but memorable role in Ernst Lubitsch’s frothy 1946 comedy Cluny Brown, stealing the film’s early scenes as the other of Jennifer Jones’ first suitor, Richard Haydn.

Her screen career in decline in the 1950s, she nevertheless went out in style repeating her Broadway role of the hard-of-hearing housekeeper in Agatha Christie’s Witness for the Prosecution in Billy Wilder’s 1957 screen version.

She died in 1959 at 78.

ESSENTIAL FILMS

CAVALCADE (1933), directed by Frank Lloyd

Cavalcade is perhaps the most obscure Oscar winning Best Picture – it is not on DVD and rarely shown – but one that was extremely popular in its day. Following the lives of a family of the British upper-class and their servants from the Boer War to World War I (The Great War), with a prophetic foretelling of the coming of World War II, the film really has two leading ladies – star Diana Wynyard and character actress O’Connor, who steals every scene she’s in. Wynyard’s stiff upper-lip style of acting, which won her an Oscar nomination, quickly went out of fashion, but O’Connor’s rags-to-riches maid remains as much fun today as she was then. The film may be dated, but her performance is not.

THE INVISIBLE MAN (1933), directed by James Whale

Cast as the comic relief, as she often would be throughout her career, O’Connor plays the innkeeper’s wife, landlady to crazy scientist Claude Rains in the film. This was Rains’ first sound film and his magnificent voice is the star of the film, well supported by Gloria Stuart, E.E. Clive and Henry Travers among others, but O’Connor is the one you can’t take your eyes off of. Genteel and proper at the outset, she’s a hilarious, hysterical mess as she sees Rains’ scientist unravel the bandages around his head to reveal there’s nothing there.

THE INFORMER (1935), directed by John Ford

The film that won John Ford his first Oscar for Best Director was an atmospheric gem shot on a miniscule budget on a small sound stage at RKO. There is very little scenery in the film, which employs lots of use of a fog machine to hide that fact. The strength of the film lies in its casting. Victor McLaglen won an Oscar as a man who sells his soul for forty pieces of silver when he gives up his friend (Wallace Ford) as a member of the IRA.

The supporting cast is excellent as well, with Wallace Ford as the hunted IRA member and Margot Grahame both quite memorable, but the big scene stealer is once again Una O’Connor. O’Connor, who is only briefly seen and has very little dialogue, conveys volumes with just the tilt of her head as the saintly mother of the martyred IRA member.

THIS LAND IS MINE (1943), directed by Jean Renoir

O’Connor had her biggest screen role as Charles Laughton’s domineering mother in Renoir’s film about a Nazi occupied town “somewhere in Europe”, but clearly France. Laughton is a timid schoolteacher afraid of his own shadow, walking a fine line between collaboration and resistance. O’Connor foolishly collaborates with the Nazis thinking it will keep her and her son out of harm’s way, but instead gets him arrested for a crime he didn’t commit. Beautifully acted by the entire cast including Maureen O’Hara, George Sanders, Kent Smith and Walter Slezak, it is, however, Laughton and O’Connor, both of whom are heartbreaking, who really shine.

WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION (1957), directed by Billy Wilder

Her role of the hard-of-hearing Scottish housekeeper was the comic relief in the Broadway version of Agatha Christie’s Witness for the Prosecution. The film version added a new character for comic relief, that of barrister Charles Laughton’s nurse, played by his real-life wife Elsa Lanchester. O’Connor’s character, though just as funny on screen, takes a back seat to Lanchester’s antics, pushing O’Connor’s performance to the background. Nevertheless, along with Laughton, Lanchester and an amazing Marlene Dietrich, O’Connor’s performance is one you remember. Top-billed Tyrone Power, like Laughton in The Barretts of Wimpole Street and This Land Is Mine, and Lanchester in David Copperfield and Bride of Frankenstein, had worked with O’Connor before. She played his mother in 1937’s Lloyd’s of London.