HELEN HAYES

HAYES, HELEN (Helen Hayes Brown) (1900–1993) Actress

Hailed as the “First Lady of the American Theater,” Helen Hayes’s distinguished acting career stretched over an amazing 84 years. Born Helen Hayes Brown in Washington, D.C., on October 10, 1900, her early interest in playacting and theatergoing delighted her mother, Essie. Herself a minor stage comedian, Essie soon placed her own theatrical ambitions on her daughter, who first appeared onstage at age five. At nine, Helen made her professional debut playing a prince in  The Royal Family (1909). The part brought her to the attention of producer Lew Fields, who cast her in several New York shows. Although film was then viewed with scorn by theater people, Helen also appeared in a few movie shorts, including Jean and the Calico Dog (1910). Essie and Helen returned to Washington in 1911, but Helen continued to perform in plays both there and in New York City. Now billed as Helen Hayes, she always earned enthusiastic praise from reviewers. She later claimed her reputation as an excellent child actress was due to her being a quick study. But in fact she worked hard to develop her own acting technique by studying her adult costars and receiving her mother’s relentless coaching.

After graduating from high school, Hayes had her first major success with the touring production of  Pollyanna (1918). The saccharine melodrama featured her as the ever cheery, ever optimistic title character. Standing only five feet tall and weighing only 100 pounds, Hayes was soon known for playing young, innocent waifs. In addition to helping to typecast her in these limited roles,  Pollyanna also marked the beginning of her association with producer George C. Tyler. Under contract to Tyler, Hayes appeared in one or two Broadway shows a year, usually light fare such as Booth Tarkington’s  Penrod (1918) and James Barrie’s Dear Brutus (1918). Hayes was given her first star billing with Bab (1920). Otherwise, the show was a withering disappointment for the young actress. Critics found her performance mannered and began to speculate that Hayes had little real acting talent. Shaken by the reviews, Hayes began to study acting and voice, as well as taking lessons in dance, fencing, and boxing. She hoped to learn to free her voice and movements so she would seem more natural on stage.

In 1924 she also took the risky step of severing ties with Tyler by defying his demands that she not join the Actors’ Equity union. Liberated from Tyler’s tight control over her professional and personal life, Hayes was able to pursue more substantial roles. She found parts in productions of She Stoops to Conquer (1924) and Caesar and Cleopatra (1925) before scoring hits with  What Every Woman Knows (1926) and  Coquette (1927). Playing a fiapper in Coquette, Hayes emerged from its three-year run as one of America’s leading young actresses. While reprising some of her best-known roles on radio, a sponsor even touted her as the “First Lady of the American Theater.” The tag stuck, even though Hayes at the time felt it was mischaracterization that ignored the excellent work done by other star Broadway actresses. In 1928, while performing in Coquette, Hayes married playwright Charles MacArthur, best known for cowriting the play  The Front Page (1928). To their friends, the match appeared an odd one with little chance for lasting success. MacArthur was a witty, urbane womanizer, while Hayes was far less worldly and far more disciplined. Although MacArthur’s excessive drinking would cause problems in their marriage, they both found in each other the support they needed to do their best creative work. They and their two children, Mary and James, eventually settled in a large Victorian house in Nyack, New York, where they entertained Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontanne, Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, and other great wits and theatrical luminaries.

After their marriage, MacArthur and Hayes were courted by Hollywood. As he became one of the movie industry’s highest-paid screenwriters, she began to star in feature films. In 1931, she won an Academy Award for best actress for her performance in The Sin of Madelon Claudet, the script of which was heavily doctored by her husband. She also received acclaim in Arrowsmith (1931) and A Farewell to Arms (1932). Still, the down-to-earth Hayes never quite fit the mold of the glamorous star. MacArthur, too, grew disillusioned with Hollywood, and the couple agreed to move back to New York and focus on stage work. In 1933, Hayes made a splash in Mary of Scotland. Playing another British monarch, this time Queen Victoria, she reached the pinnacle of her career in Victoria Regina (1935). The demanding play required her to portray the queen from her teens to her old age. Owing largely to Hayes’s spectacular performance, the drama ran onBroadway for two years and toured for still another two. All told, she played Victoria about 1,000 times before a total audience of approxi- mately 2 million.

In the 1940s, Hayes appeared in a variety of serious dramas such as Harriet (1943), a biographical play about Harriet Beecher Stowe, and  The Glass Menagerie (1948), Tennessee Williams’s classic work about a matriarch desperately clinging to her illusions. In 1947, however, she won the first Tony Award for best actress for Happy Birthday, a light comedy written by her friend Anita Loos.By this time, Hayes’s teenage daughter, Mary, was a beautiful aspiring actress, who frequently appeared in her mother’s plays. While preparing for a new part in 1949, Mary contracted  polio and died. The loss devastated Hayes andMacArthur. Urged on by her husband, Hayes tried to conquer her sorrow by doing charity work for polio research and returning to the stage, most notably in The Wisteria Trees (1950), a version of Anton Chekhov’s  The Cherry Orchard set in the American South. MacArthur had more difficulty recovering after Mary’s death. Always prone to depression, he was unable to work, and his drinking problem grew worse. In 1956, MacArthur died of alcohol-related illnesses. Although Hayes lived for almost 40 more years, she was never romantically linked with another man after MacArthur’s death. Though she acted occasionally on television and radio, Hayes continued to concentrate on theater work. In 1955, she appeared in A Touch of the Poet in a New York house renamed the Helen Hayes Theater in her honor, and in 1958, she earned her second Tony Award for Time Remembered. With the support of the State Department, in the early 1960s she went on a world tour, performing in The Glass Menagerie and By the Skin of Our Teeth, among other American classics. To the surprise of many, Hayes gave up highprofile productions to join the APA-Phoenix Repertory Company in 1966. Playing both small roles and large, she performed with the troupe until financial difficulties forced it to disband two years later.

Approaching her 70s, Hayes announced in 1969 that she was leaving the theater. Yet, she was quickly lured back by revivals of The Front Page (1969) and Harvey (1970). By 1971, however, she had developed an allergic reaction to theater dust that made stage work impossible. She made her last stage appearance that year in Long Day’s Journey Into Night in her hometown of Washington. Hayes refocused on work in film and television. In 1970, she won a second Oscar for best supporting actress for playing a feisty stowaway in the disaster movie  Airport. On television, she made numerous guest appearances, most notably a spot on Hawaii 5-0, a crime drama costarring her son, James MacArthur. She also starred briefiy with Mildred Natwick in her own series, The Snoop Sisters (1973–74). In 1985 Hayes retired from show business. She often traveled to receive awards and attend functions in her honor, but otherwise spent her last days at her Nyack estate. On May 17, 1993, she died there of a heart attack at the age of 92. Ever modest, Helen Hayes once ascribed her success to “the quality of being average,” a self-deprecat-ing way of describing her gift for bonding with audiences. Whether portraying sweet ingenues, imperious queens, or impish little old ladies, she played her characters with a dignity and warmth that endeared her to the public over nine decades.

Further Reading
Barrow, Kenneth. Helen Hayes: First Lady of the American Theater. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1985.
Hayes, Helen, with Katherine Hatch. My Life in Three Acts. San Diego: Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich, 1990.
Murphy, Donn B., and Stephen Moore. Helen Hayes: A BioBibliography.Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993.

Recommended Recorded and Videotaped Performances
Arrowsmith (1931). MGM/UA, VHS, 2000.
A Farewell to Arms (1957). Image Entertainment, DVD, 1999.
The Sin of Madelon Claudet (1931). MGM/UA, VHS, 1991.

READ MORE - HELEN HAYES

JEAN HARLOW

HARLOW, JEAN (Harlean Harlow Carpenter) (1911–1937) Actress

Forever the embodiment of the blond bombshell, Jean Harlow became one of the greatest stars of the 1930s, although her career lasted less than a decade. On March 3, 1911, she was born Harlean Harlow Carpenter in Kansas City. After her parents divorced in 1922, her domineering mother, Jean, moved with Harlean to Los Angeles, where Jean pursued an acting career with little success. She and her daughter soon returned to Kansas City, later moving to Chicago after Jean remarried. At a school dance, Harlean met Charles McGrew II, a wealthy student with whom she eloped at age 16. The couple set up home in Beverly Hills. Harleen quickly tired of life as a housewife. Divorcing McGrew in 1929, she began finding jobs as an extra in films such as Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights (1931). Working her way into bit parts, she appeared in Double Whoopee (1929), a comedy short with Laurel and Hardy, and Saturday Night Kid (1929), a silent feature starring sex symbol CLARA BOW.

Now billed as Jean Harlow, she had her big break in 1930, when she was cast in Howard Hughes’s Hell’s Angels. An enormously expensive film about World War I, it boasted fabulous aerial footage but featured woefully weak characters and plot. Critics were particularly critical of Harlow’s mannered performance. Yet, despite her amateurish acting, the public was intrigued by the lighthaired, green-eyed beauty. Encouraged by the touting of Hollywood’s new “platinum blond” by Hughes’s publicity machine, women began trying to capture the Harlow look.

Almost overnight, Harlow became a star in great demand. Hughes loaned out his find to a series of studios, which inevitably cast her as a tough, worldly woman with no hesitation to use her sexual appeal to get what she wants. After playing variations on this type in films such as Public Enemy (1931) and Iron Man (1931), she welcomed the chance to play a wealthy heiress in a Frank Capra comedy. But the film did little to change her image after it was retitled Platinum Blonde (1931) to capitalize on Harlow’s newfound fame. Feeling frustrated with being pigeonholed, Harlow went head-to-head with Hughes, who in retaliation sold her contract to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). The move to the new studio proved a great career boost. MGM recognized her comic gifts and placed her in several vehicles that showed them to their best advantage. In 1932 she cemented her stardom with Red-Headed Woman, a comedy written by Anita Loos in which she played a gold-digging secretary out to seduce her boss. Almost unique in films of the day, in the end Harlow’s bad girl got her man without having to suffer for her conniving. Harlow followed its success with Red Dust (1932) and Hold Your Man (1933), both of which paired her effectively with Clark Gable. But she found perhaps her best role in Bombshell (1933), a savage Hollywood satire in which Harlow perfectly lampooned her own sexpot image.

While she was enjoying spectacular professional success, Harlow experienced a series of personal disasters. The most public was her brief marriage in 1932 to MGM executive Paul Bern, who was twice her age. Known for acting as a kindly adviser to stars, Bern committed suicide only two months after their wedding. His suicide note, which was widely reproduced in the press, included an apology to Harlow and hinted that impotence had led him to take his own life. Hollywood gossips sensationalized Bern’s death, but the resulting publicity helped rather than hurt Harlow by eliciting public sympathy for the young bride.

When she insisted on returning to work on Red Dust after the suicide, Gable was reported to have said, “That little lady has more guts than any man in Hollywood!” Harlow went the altar a third time the following year, wedding Bombshell ’s cinematographer Harold Rosson, again a man many years her senior. The marriage lasted only 14 months. Harlow had a final, impassioned romance with actor William Powell, with whom she costarred in Reckless (1935), but the couple never married. While filming Saratoga (1937) opposite Gable, Harlow became ill with blood poisoning. Only 10 days later, on June 7, 1937, she was dead at the age of 26. The news of her sudden, expected death stunned Hollywood and shocked her devoted fans. Though Harlow left behind only a handful of films, she has remained a powerful infiuence in cinema history for her creation of screen sirens whose allure lay as much in their wit as their sex appeal.

Further Reading
Golden, Eve. Platinum Girl: The Life and Legends of Jean Harlow. New York: Abbeville Press, 1991.
Stenn, David. Bombshell: The Life and Death of Jean Harlow. New York: Doubleday 1993.

Recommended Recorded and Videotaped Performances
Bombshell (1933). Warner Home Video, VHS, 1992.
Intimate Portrait: Jean Harlow (1999). Unapix, VHS, 2000.
Red-Headed Woman (1932). Warner Home Video, VHS, 1992.

READ MORE - JEAN HARLOW

MARTHA GRAHAM

GRAHAM, MARTHA (1894–1991) Dancer, Choreographer

One of the most infiuential artists of the 20th century, Martha Graham revolutionized modern dance during her 75-year career. Through her 200 dance works, her much-studied technique, and unique and powerful passion as a dancer, she had an enduring effect not only on dance but on all the American fine arts.

The oldest of three sisters, Graham was born on May 11, 1894, in Allegheny, Pennsylvania. Even as a small child, she found stifiing the puritanical society of her hometown. Martha’s youth was brightened, however, by her physician father, whom she loved and revered. She credited him with the observation that would guide her life—“Movement never lies.” Although the context in which he said this is unclear, his words inspired her always to place emotional honesty at the core of her art. In 1909, Graham’s life changed dramatically following her family’s move to Santa Barbara, California. She bloomed in this setting, finding herself far more free to explore her creativity than she had been in New England. Although showing a decidedly artistic bent Graham received no formal dance training. Still, she was determined to pursue a dance career after her father took her to a concert of the Denishawn dancers when she was 17. Headed by RUTH ST. DENIS and Ted Shawn, Denishawn was the premier modern dance troupe of the day.

Over her family’s objections, Graham went to Los Angeles to study at the Denishawn school in the summer of 1916. To her disappointment, St. Denis discounted her new pupil, because she considered the 21-year-old Graham far too old to become a serious student. St. Denis did, however, readily recruit Graham to fashion costumes for the company, which ignited her lifelong fascination with costume design.

As a dancer, Graham received much more encouragement from Shawn. He took her under his wing, helping to shape her into one of Denishawn’s leading dancers. In 1920 he gave her the lead female role in his ballet Xochitl. Although she recognized a debt to Shawn, it was not enough to save him from becoming the target of her already notorious anger. One story holds that while dancing with Graham, Shawn once accidentally hit her head on the fioor. Her immediate response was to
bite him on the arm as hard as possible. Graham toured with Denishawn for four years, then spent two more as a soloist in a New York dance troupe, the Greenwich Village Follies. In 1926, though, she decided she had to strike out on her own. To get the challenges and exposure she craved as a dancer, she realized, she would have to become her own choreographer. The move showed daring, since she had no financial resources to fall back on. In addition to teaching dance, Graham
had to model furs and perform in Radio City Music Hall extravaganzas to earn enough money to survive while she pursued her new goal. In April 1926, she borrowed $1,000 to fund her debut concert, which featured herself and three students as the performers. Graham’s early works were experimental and bold. Although they seemed obscure and inaccessible to many, she soon attracted a crowd of devoted fans. Somber and stark, her dances dealt with emotions, but only in their most abstracted form. In Lamentation (1930), for example, she performed a solo while encased in a tube of stretch jersey. She pushed her limbs against the confining fabric to express the agony of grief. Perhaps her greatest work of this period was Primitive Mysteries, which was staged in New York by the Dance Repertory Theater in 1931. Inspired by a trip to the Southwest, the dance drew from the Indian and Spanish religious rituals of the region. It was also deeply infiuenced by the composer, Louis Horst, who was also Graham’s lover.

Horst encouraged Graham to commission music with strong, simple instrumentation that would serve to focus attention on the dance itself. In her own choreography, Graham consciously worked to eliminate the fussiness she saw in both ballet and the Denishawn tradition. Her movements were not pretty or delicate. They were powerful and intense, drawing from the animal-like ferocity Graham lent to her own performances. The technique she developed was also well suited to her body type. Though only a petite 5’2”, Graham had an extraordinarily strong torso and back. These attributes were crucial to her theory of “contraction and release,” which called for a dancer’s body first to cave in at the center, then to open outward. Graham also favored angular positions for the arms and legs. She became so associated with angularity that one critic quipped that if she ever became pregnant, she would give birth to a cube.

In 1936, Graham’s artistic direction changed suddenly when she met a young dancer named Erick Hawkins. She brought Hawkins into her company, which previously had been made up exclusively of women. His addition gave her new avenues for choreography as she began creating dances with herself and Hawkins as the principals. More important, her intense love for Hawkins, whom she would marry in 1948, moved her away from an abstraction of feelings to a more direct expression of human emotions.

Hawkins first appeared with Graham in American Document (1938), which was her first major success. The inventive work incorporated elements of the minstrel show to comment on racial injustice. It also signaled her growing interest in American themes, which culminated in Appalachian Spring (1944). Graham’s most famous work, this classic is arguably the best-loved dance piece of the twentieth century. Set to a score by Aaron Copland, it depicts the marriage of a frontier bride and groom, roles originated by Graham and Hawkins. The stark set design was also one of the many fruitful collaborations between Graham and sculptor Isamu Noguchi. Noguchi’s minimalist sets for Graham would have an extraordinary impact internationally on both dance and theater. In the late 1940s, Graham headed into a new and extraordinary phase of her career. Drawing on her fascination with Jungian psychology and Greek myths, she began to look to Greek tragedies for inspiration. Monumental and highly emotional, many of her works during this period presented these stories from a woman’s point of view.

Graham’s Night Journey (1947), for instance, told the tale of Oedipus from the perspective of his mother and wife, the queen Jocasta. By some devotees, Graham’s “Greek period” appeared to refiect on the stage her own inner turmoil over her volatile relationship with her husband. In one example, the depiction of Medea’s jealously in Cave of the Heart (1946) was seen to mirror Graham’s fear of losing Hawkins to a younger woman. Graham and Hawkins finally divorced in 1954. The loss was devastating to Graham both personally and professionally, since much of her most respected work had been inspired by her feelings for Hawkins. Graham’s despair was only worsened by her own physical deterioration. Increasingly, her aging body was not up to the task of dancing her own works. Still, Graham refused to stop performing and stubbornly made no attempt to train younger dancers to take over her lead roles. She continued to dance long past her prime, retiring finally in 1969 when it became obvious, even to her, that she could no longer go on. Graham later recalled that after her decision to give up performing, she was so distraught she “wished to die.”

After several dark years, Graham began to apply her indomitable will to a new project—preserving her legacy as a choreographer. In the mid-1970s, she began revisiting her earlier works, adapting and reinterpreting them for other dancers. She also consciously started to project to the public a persona as a living legend. Often photographed in glamour shots, Graham took to making provocatively cryptic pronouncements to the press. This era in her career was dubbed by some as her “Halston period,” after one of her many celebrity friends, the fashion designer Halston, who once created gold lamé costumes for her company. While cementing her place in dance history, Graham also was developing new dance works. For some of the most noteworthy, she abandoned her practice of commissioning scores and instead built choreography around existing musical works. For instance, The Rite of Spring (1984) offered Graham’s own interpretation of Igor Stravinsky’s classic, while her last work, Maple Leaf Rag (1990), drew on her love of Scott Joplin’s ragtime compositions.

On April 1, 1991, Graham’s long career came to an end with her death at age 96. Internationally hailed as a genius, she left virtually no aspect of dance untouched by her infiuence. As a choreographer, she gave the world hundreds of dance works, many of which are still staged by dance companies around the globe. As a teacher, she defined a technique that has become part of nearly every professional dancer’s education. And as a performer, she set a standard of discipline, commitment, and passion that continues to inspire artists in all fields.

Further Reading
Graham, Martha. Blood Memory. New York: Doubleday, 1991.
De Mille, Agnes. Martha: The Life and Works of Martha Graham. New York: Random House, 1991.
Stodelle, Ernestine. Deep Song: The Dance Story of Martha Graham. New York: Schirmer Books, 1984.
Tracy, Robert. Goddess: Martha Graham’s Dancers Remember. New York: Limelight Editions, 1997.


Recommended Recorded and Videotaped Performances
Martha Graham: The Dancer Revealed. Kultur Video, VHS, 1994.
3 by Martha Graham. Pyramid Home Video, VHS, 1991.

READ MORE - MARTHA GRAHAM

BETTY GRABLE

GRABLE, BETTY (Ruth Elizabeth Grable) (1916–1973) Actress, Dancer, Singer

“As American as apple pie and Betty Grable,” a popular slogan of the 1940s, illustrates Grable’s enormous popularity with a public troubled by the trials and uncertainties of the war years. Born Ruth Elizabeth Grable on December 18, 1916, she was raised in St. Louis, Missouri, one of two daughters of a successful stockbroker and his theatrically ambitious wife. Frustrated by her own failures to launch a singing career, Grable’s mother, Lillian, forced on Betty a grueling schedule of acting, dancing, singing, and music instruction. “I hated every lesson,” Grable later recalled. To advance Betty’s career, Lillian moved her daughter to Los Angeles. Due to her mother’s persistence, by 1930 Betty had a contract with Twentieth Century-Fox, but the studio dismissed her when it discovered she was only 13. She made several shorts directed by comedian Fatty Arbuckle before delivering a breakdown performance in a comic dance number in the Fred Astaire–GINGER ROGERS vehicle The Gay Divorcee (1934). Grable’s career was also given a boost by her marriage to former child star Jackie Coogan in 1937. Together they appeared in two successful college comedies. Their personal relationship, however, faltered as Coogan suffered several financial setbacks. The couple divorced in 1939.

Still a star on the rise, Grable signed a new contract with Twentieth Century-Fox, beginning a 10 year association with the studio. Grable almost immediately became the studio’s reigning star when she was called on to replace an ailing Alice Faye in Down Argentine Way (1940). The movie was a substantial hit, and soon Grable was appearing a series of lighthearted musicals filmed using the new technology of Technicolor. Although never a favorite with critics, Grable attracted legions of fans. Her wholesomely sexy image attracted men, whereas her warmth and personal charm made her equally appealing to women. Twentieth Century-Fox, however, was most interested in promoting not Grable’s personality, but her most outstanding physical asset—her shapely legs. In addition to showcasing them in her dance numbers, the studio insured Grable’s legs for $1 million dollars as a publicity stunt.

Her male fans, especially those sent overseas with the outbreak of World War II, responded with demands for pinups of Grable. The result was perhaps the most famous publicity still in the history of American film. Photographed from the back wearing a white swimsuit and high heels, Grable was shown with her head turned, looking coyly back at the viewer. Perfectly capturing Grable’s innocence fiavored with just a hint of naughtiness, the pinup became a phenomenon. More than 3 million were sent to soldiers, some of whom made their own tributes to Grable by painting the image on their PT boats and B-22 bombers. With the war years, Grable became not only an American icon but also the highest-paid woman in the United States. Yet, despite the success she brought Twentieth Century-Fox, she was constantly at war with studio head Darryl F. Zanuck. He wanted to put her in dramas, but Grable rightly sensed that the public most wanted to see her in the lighter fare that had made her a star. In 1953 she severed ties with Zanuck after filming How to Marry a Millionaire, which also featured the studio’s new star MARILYN MONROE.

In the years that followed, Grable found herself in growing financial difficulties. In 1943 she had married bandleader Harry James, who gambled away their earnings and amassed sizable debts. To earn a living for them and their two children, Grable often had to take substandard work in Las Vegas shows and television specials and commercials. She divorced James in 1965, after which Grable found renewed popularity performing in touring companies of Broadway musicals, such as Hello Dolly! On July 2, 1973, this new career was stopped short by her death at 56 from lung cancer.

Further Reading
Billman, Larry. Betty Grable: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993.
Pastos, Spero.  Pin-Up: The Tragedy of Betty Grable. New York: Putnam, 1986.
Warren, Doug. Betty Grable: The Reluctant Movie Queen. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981.

Recommended Recorded and Videotaped Performances
Down Argentine Way (1940).  Twentieth Century-Fox, VHS, 1989.
The Gay Divorcee (1934). Turner Home Video, VHS, 1999.
How to Marry a Millionaire (1953). Twentieth Century Fox, VHS, 1992.

READ MORE - BETTY GRABLE

WHOOPI GOLDBERG

GOLDBERG ,WHOOPI (Caryn Johnson) (ca. 1955– ) Actress, Comic, Talk Show Host

With her offbeat humor and looks, Whoopi Goldberg is perhaps the film industry’s most unlikely star. A native New Yorker, she was born Caryn Johnson on November 13, probably in 1955. Though raised in poverty in a housing project, she was ambitious and self-confident, sure that one day she would achieve her dream of becoming an actress. Her early ambitions were fueled by watching movies on television, often three or four a day. At eight, Caryn began her performing career with the Helena Rubinstein Children’s Theater. Caryn found school far less satisfying. Undiagnosed dyslexia made her such a poor student that she was labeled retarded. Discouraged, she dropped out and drifted into drugs, eventually becoming a heroin addict. By her late teens, she had kicked heroin with the help of drug counselor, whom she married. During their brief union, she had one child, Alexandrea. Still determined to act professionally, Johnson moved to San Diego, California, in 1974. She joined Spontaneous Combustion, an improvisation troupe, and was a founding member of the San Diego Repertory Theater. To make a living, she worked various jobs, including hairdressing and making up corpses in a funeral parlor. Raising her daughter alone, she was forced to go on welfare for several years, an experience she remembers as humiliating. Yet, her confidence in her talents never waned. She later recalled, “Even when I wasn’t making any money, I always knew I was good.”

Johnson adopted the stage name Whoopi Cushion (pronounced kush-ON), but when her mother complained that it was undignified, she began using the surname Goldberg, a name from her family tree. She first used this billing in a twocharacter show she performed with the comedian Don Victor. Goldberg took the show to San Francisco, where she soon began working with Blake Street Hawkeyes theater troupe. There, she developed The Spook Show, a one-woman production in which she played a variety of characters, including a junkie and a nine-year-old African-American girl who dreams of becoming white. While performing The Spook Show at a workshop in New York City, Goldberg drew the attention of director Mike Nichols. Nichols

offered to produce her show and bring it to Broadway. Retitled Whoopi Goldberg, the show opened to admiring reviews on October 24, 1984. A videotaped performance was aired on HBO the following year. One of Goldberg’s new fans was Steven Spielberg, who hired her to star in his film The Color Purple (1985). Goldberg’s quiet, subtle performance won her a Golden Globe Award and an Oscar nomination. The movie, and by extension Goldberg, were criticized by many African Americans, who took exception with the movie’s unfiattering depiction of its black male characters. In 1986, Goldberg used her newfound fame to relieve the plight of the homeless. With Billy Crystal and Robin Williams, she began hosting an annual comedy benefit concert, Comic Relief. Goldberg has campaigned for many other social causes, including abortion rights and services for people with AIDS.

Although pronounced a new star after The Color Purple, Goldberg had trouble finding good parts. She made a string of movies—including Jumpin’ Jack Flash (1986), Burglar (1987), and Fatal Beauty (1987)—in which her performance far outshone the mediocre material she was given. After appearing in several commercial failures, she was written off by many Hollywood insiders. Goldberg proved them wrong with Ghost (1990), in which she played a supporting comic role as a phony psychic. The film became a surprise hit and won Goldberg a best supporting actress Oscar. She became the first African-American actress since HATTIE MCDANIEL to receive an Academy Award. Her stardom confirmed, Goldberg threw herself into a wide variety of projects. On television, she appeared in Bagdad Cafe (1990), a shortlived situation comedy, and became a regular cast member of Star Trek: The Next Generation. In 1992, she became the host of The Whoopi Goldberg Show, a half-hour late-night talk show that featured one-on-one conversations between Goldberg and her guest. The show was soon canceled due to poor ratings.

In film, Goldberg scored a critical success with The Long Walk Home (1990), a drama set during the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott of the 1950s. Two years later, she again proved her ability to attract a wide audience with Sister Act (1992), in which she played a nightclub singer masquerading as a nun. Goldberg earned $8 million for its poorly received sequel, Sister Act II (1993). While filming Made in America (1993), Goldberg began a widely publicized romance with her white costar, Ted Danson. To satirize the hate mail the couple was receiving, Goldberg wrote a vulgar comedy routine that Danson delivered in blackface at a Friars Club “roast,” a comic tribute to one of this entertainment organization’s members. Few found the performance amusing. Goldberg and Danson were slammed by offended critics.

The incident did little to dull Goldberg’s popularity, however. In the late 1990s, she was chosen to host the Academy Awards several times, becoming the first African American to do so. She continued to be a sought-after film actress, appearing in Corrina, Corrina (1994), Boys on the Side (1995), and Ghosts of Mississippi (1995). On the set of Corrina, Corrina, she met union organizer Lyle Trachtenberg, to whom she was briefiy married. In 1998, Goldberg returned to theater, taking over the role of Pseudolus in the Broadway revival of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. She also became a regular on the television game show The Hollywood Squares. Once dismissed as too unconventional for stardom, Goldberg has become one of the hardestworking women in the American entertainment industry. As she told an interviewer in 2000, “You know, I was supposed to be a fiash in the pan. I’m the longest fiash Hollywood’s ever seen.”

Further Reading
Goldberg, Whoopi. Book. New York: Rob Weisbach Books, 1997.
Parrish, James Robert. Whoopi Goldberg: Her Journey from Poverty to Megastardom. New York: Birch Lane Books, 1997.

Recommended Recorded and Videotaped Performances
The Color Purple (1985). Warner Home Video, DVD/VHS, 1997/1999.
Ghost (1990). Paramount, VHS, 2001.
Sister Act (1992). Touchstone Video, VHS, 1996.

READ MORE - WHOOPI GOLDBERG

LILLIAN GISH

GISH, LILLIAN (1893–1993) Actress, Director

Born the same year the movie camera was invented, Lillian Gish was one of the most infiuential pioneers of the film industry. She was born in Springfield, Ohio, on October 14, 1893 (although, to make her seem younger, her birth year was later given as 1896). The Gishes soon moved to New York City, where her father abandoned the family. Left to care for Lillian and her little sister, Dorothy, on her own, Gish’s mother, Mary, managed a boardinghouse for performers. There, all three were drawn into the world of the theater. “Baby Lillian,” as she was billed, made her stage debut in In Convict Stripes in 1902. For the rest of her youth, she spent most of her time appearing in touring companies, often traveling alone from show to show.

In New York, the Gish sisters became friends with another young actress, Gladys Smith, who would soon find superstardom as MARY PICKFORD. Then working for the Biograph film studio, Smith introduced them to director D. W. Griffith, who was immediately struck by their delicate beauty. Legend has it that, without warning, he shot a prop gun over their heads. The Gish girls’ horrified shrieks convinced him that they could emote onscreen. Griffith promptly hired them to work in his next film An Unseen Enemy (1912). They soon followed Griffith to the Mutual Film Corporation, where he and Lillian collaborated on several of the greatest films of the silent era.

Griffith always encouraged ideas and suggestions from his players, a practice that was particularly fruitful in his relationship with Lillian Gish. They both shared a commitment to film, which they viewed as legitimate art form at a time when few considered it more than a curiosity. On Griffith’s advice, Gish researched her roles thoroughly, reading voraciously to prepare herself for every part, even though she had had nearly no formal education. She also took lessons in voice and dance, eventually becoming a skilled athlete able and willing to do dangerous stunt work. Her devotion to her work is clear from an anecdote recounted by an eyewitness who watched Griffith film Gish outside during a snowstorm: “D. W. would ask her if she could stand it, and she would nod. The icicles hung from her lashes, and her face was blue. When the last shot was made they had to carry her to the studio.”With Griffith’s encouragement, Gish developed a particularly effective acting style that almost immediately distinguished her from her peers.

Most theater actors were trained to use broad gestures that looked too mannered and stiff on the screen. Gish sensed that film required much more subtle gestures and more subdued demonstrations of feeling. Especially in close-ups, she was able to use small changes in her facial expressions to communicate deep, often even contradictory emotions. Ever since, film acting has been based on these early innovations of Gish. In Gish’s first films, she often played a young woman in danger, who is dramatically saved at the last minute. Lovely, yet frail-looking, she, under Griffith’s infiuence, became the embodiment of innocent, female virtue. Gish’s own forcefulness, however, lent an underlying strength to her idealized screen persona.

Gish emerged as a bona fide film star with the release of The Birth of a Nation (1915), which became the most successful silent film ever made. Controversial for its racist presentation of African Americans, Nation was the first narrative film epic and introduced many of the shots and techniques that now serve as the basic syntax of moviemaking. In it, Gish starred as Elsie Stoneman, a young woman suffering various travails during the chaos of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Gish also appeared in Griffith’s masterpiece Intolerance (1916), the director’s response to efforts to ban his earlier film. Its four sections, set in different time periods, were linked by the repeated image of Gish rocking a cradle.

Gish delivered perhaps her most powerful performance in Broken Blossoms (1919), although she begged Griffith to cast someone else in the lead. Then in her late 20s, she felt far too old to be convincing as a young girl terrorized by her violent father. Despite her hesitance, she proved convincing, especially in her climactic death scene. The intensity of her fear as her father beats her to death left audiences in a stunned silence at the picture’s end. Gish also won great acclaim for Griffith’s Way Down East (1920) and Orphans of the Storm (1922), the latter of which also starred her sister, Dorothy. Gish’s tenure as Griffith’s muse came to end when he realized her name could sell more tickets than his. Calling her into his office, he told her he could no longer pay her what she was worth, insisting that for her own interest she needed to work elsewhere to fully capitalize on her success. Gish hesitantly went off on her own. She invested money in Inspiration Films, where she made The White Sister (1923) and Romola (1924). Gish then signed a lucrative five-movie deal with MetroGoldwyn-Mayer (MGM) that gave her control over the stories and directors chosen for her. Her MGM films included La Boheme (1926), TheScarlet Letter (1926), and The Wind (1928). In the 1930s, Gish made the transition into talking pictures with One Romantic Night (1930) and His Double Life (1933). Yet she found her popularity fading due to changes in public tastes. Audiences now wanted to see fiappers like CLARA BOW and exotic beauties like GRETA GARBO—not the Victorian angels with whom Gish had become so closely associated. Gish responded by returning to the stage, where she quickly revived her career.

She was well-received in a number of classic dramas, including Uncle Vanya and Hamlet, in which she played Ophelia opposite John Gielgud. She also became a fixture in New York intellectual circles owing to her friendship with critic George Jean Nathan, who repeatedly proposed marriage to her. She always refused, later explaining, “What kind of marriage would it have been to a wife who worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week.”By the mid-1940s, Gish was also working periodically in films, often in supporting roles. As a supporting actress, she was nominated for an Academy Award for her work in Duel in the Sun (1947). Soon she was appearing regularly on television as well, in made-for-television movies and as a guest star on series.

An advocate for film preservation, Gish wrote two books about her life in movies—The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me (1969) and Dorothy and Lillian Gish (1973). In 1969, she began discussing her career in a lecture series, Lillian Gish and the Movies, which eventually toured the United States, Canada, western Europe, and Russia. Her work was also celebrated with a special Oscar in 1971, a Kennedy Center Honor in 1982, and an American Film Institute Lifetime Achievement Award in 1984. Gish’s final film was The Whales of August (1987), which paired her with another screen legend, BETTE DAVIS. During the filming, the cast and crew were awed by Gish’s emotive powers in a particular scene. The acerbic Davis, exasperated with the to-do, offered her own more pointed and perhaps more fitting praise for Gish’s performance. “Of course, it’s a great close-up. She invented the goddam shot.”On February 27, 1993, Lillian Gish died in her sleep, just months away from her 100th birthday. In her will, she established the “Dorothy and Lillian Gish Award,” which each year pays the annual proceeds from her multimillion-dollar estate to a person distinguished in the arts.

Further Reading
Affron, Charles. Lillian Gish: Her Legend, Her Life. New York: Scribner, 2001.
Gish, Lillian. Dorothy and Lillian Gish. New York: Scribners, 1973.
Gish, Lillian, with Ann Pinchot. The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me. 1969. Reprint, San Francisco: Mercury House, 1988.

Recommended Recorded and Videotaped Performances
The Birth of a Nation (1915). Image Entertainment, DVD, 1998.
Broken Blossoms (1919). Image Entertainment, DVD, 1999.
Duel in the Sun (1946). Anchor Bay Entertainment, DVD/VHS, 2000/1998.
Orphans of the Storm (1921). Image Entertainment, DVD, 1998.

READ MORE - LILLIAN GISH

DOROTHY GISH

GISH, DOROTHY (1898–1968) Actress

In her seven-decade career, Dorothy Gish was aleading lady of the theater and a pioneer in film and television. She was born on March 11, 1898, in Dayton, Ohio, but soon moved to New YorkCity. Burdened by business failures, her father abandoned his family, leaving her mother, Mary, alone to care for Dorothy and her older sister, LILLIAN GISH. To help make ends meet, Mary found parts for the girls in theater productions. Dorothy made her stage debut at four, playing a boy in East Lynne. After years of touring, she had her greatest early success playing a waif in Dion O’Dare (1907). In 1912, the Gish sisters were introduced to film director D. W. Griffith by their old friend Gladys Smith, who had adopted the stage name MARY PICKFORD. Griffith immediately cast them in An Unseen Enemy (1912). Dorothy went on to appear in more than 60 of Griffith’s movies, though he was more drawn to Lillian and generally gave her better roles. Only under pressure from Lillian did Griffith agree to cast Dorothy in his World War I epic Hearts of the World (1917). She stole the movie with her comic portrayal of the Little Disturber, her favorite role of her career. Her performance made her one of the most soughtafter comedians in silent film.

Under the supervision of Griffith, Dorothy Gish made a string of comedies released by Paramount under the banner “the Dorothy Gish Artcraft-Paramount Series.” With titles such as Peppy Polly (1919) and Flying Pat (1920), these movies took advantage of Gish’s natural exuberance and gift for pantomime, which earned her the nickname “the female Chaplin.” One of her most successful Paramount comedies was Remodeling Her Husband (1920), a romantic comedy directed by her sister and written by Dorothy Parker. Gish married her costar, James Rennie, in 1920. She and Rennie were divorced 15 years later but remained friends.

Although comedy was her forte, Gish occasionally appeared in drama. Perhaps her greatest film was Orphans of the Storm (1922). The Griffith classic had her starring opposite Lillian as a blind woman caught up in the turmoil of the French Revolution. Hitting a career slump in the mid-1920s, Gish made several British films with director Herbert Wilcox, including the highly successful Nell Gwyn (1926). Her final English film, Wolves (1930), was Gish’s first talking picture. Considering it a failure, Gish retreated from film work. She made only four more movies; her final film, The Cardinal, was released in 1964.

Gish continued her acting career onstage. In 1928, she had a successful run in Young Love, which also starred Rennie. Among her many other Broadway triumphs were Brittle Heaven (1934), Missouri Legend (1938), and The Magnificent Yankee (1946). In her last theater role, she shared the stage with Lillian in The Chalk Garden (1952). In the 1950s, Gish began a new career, performing in live television dramas. Her television credits included “Harvest” (1953), which also starred James Dean, and “Morning’s at Seven” (1956). In the 1960s, Gish’s health began to fail. Shewas living in a sanitarium in Rapallo, Italy, when she died of pneumonia on June 4, 1968, with her devoted sister at her bedside.

Further Reading
Basinger, Jeanine. Silent Stars. New York: Knopf, 1999.
Gish, Lillian. Dorothy and Lillian Gish. New York: Scribners, 1973.

Recommended Recorded and Videotaped Performances
The Cardinal (1963). Warner Home Video, VHS, 1994.
Harvest (1953). Timeless Video, VHS, 1996.
Orphans of the Storm (1921). Image Entertainment, DVD, 1998.

READ MORE - DOROTHY GISH

AVA GARDNER

GARDNER, AVA (Ava Lavinia Gardener) (1922–1990) Actress

One of Hollywood’s greatest beauties, Ava Gardner was born Ava Lavinia Gardener on December 24, 1922. The daughter of a sharecropper, she spent her early years in Grabtown, a small, rural community outside Smithfield, North Carolina.After graduating from high school, she briefly attended Atlanta Christian College, with the intention of becoming a stenographer.In 1941, Gardner traveled to New York to visit her older sister Bernice and her husband, Larry Tarr, a photographer. Impressed by Gardner’s beauty, Tarr took several photographs of her and placed one in the window of his studio. A clerk from the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) legal department spied the picture and convinced Tarr to send it to a studio talent scout. Gardner was given a silent screen test to mask her heavy Southern drawl. On seeing the test, one MGM official remarked, “She can’t act; she didn’t talk; she’s sensational.”

Contract in hand, Gardner took off for Hollywood. MGM gave their new discovery a barrage of acting and diction lessons, though in her early films she was expected to do little more than decorate her scenes. Resenting MGM’s disinterest in developing her talent, Gardner claimed the studio treated her like its “prize hog.” Despite her anger at MGM, Gardner took her work seriously and earned a reputation as a consummate professional. The public, however, was more interested in her personal life. At 19, she married Mickey Rooney, then MGM’s top star. His womanizing and her jealousy led to divorce 16 months later. In 1945 Gardner had second highly publicized marriage, this time to bandleader Artie Shaw. They divorced about a year later, as Gardner grew weary of Shaw’s unwelcome efforts to educate her. Through the rest of her life, Gardner remained friendly with Rooney and Shaw, as she did with most of her many lovers.

After playing small roles in about 20 films, Gardner had her breakthrough part as a treacherous nightclub singer in The Killers (1946). Because of its success, she was typecast as a femme fatale for several years. In 1951, however, she won the plum role of Julie in an all-star production of the musical Show Boat. Gardner was disappointed, though, when the studio hired Annette Warren to dub her singing voice. Also in 1951, Gardner married singer Frank Sinatra. The press was fascinated by their explosive relationship, especially their frequent public arguments. Although they divorced in 1957, Sinatra continued to regard Gardner as the love of his life. She is often credited as Sinatra’s muse for his classic recordings of the 1950s.

During this decade, Gardner was given more varied and challenging roles. She displayed a talent for wisecracking in Mogambo (1953), for whichshe was nominated for an Academy Award for best actress. The next year, she starred in The Barefoot Contessa (1954), the story of a Spanish fiamenco dancer molded into a movie star. The film’s director, Joseph Mankiewicz, later remembered her telling him, “Hell, Joe, I’m not an actress, but I think I understand this girl. She’s a lot like me.” Gardner was dismissive about her acting skills, often far more so than her critics. Although her highly photogenic face brought her to Hollywood,she projected an onscreen presence that, unlike those of most screen beauties, appealed to both men and women. No matter how glamorously she was made up, she remained charmingly down-to-earth. In her own words, she was just “a country girl.”

Press accounts of Gardner always focused on her love of drinking, smoking, and staying up all night. She, however, considered herself shy and was deeply offended by her image, which she described as “a loudmouthed, temperamental, oversexed, sultry siren.” In part to escape the press, Gardner moved toEurope in the late 1950s. While living in Spain, she became an enthusiastic fan of bullfighting and bullfighters. Gardner had many romances with matadors, including the famed Luis Miguel Dominguin. Gardner’s contract with MGM expired in 1958. In her subsequent film work, she often appeared in smaller but meatier roles. Playing a lusty widow operating a run-down Mexican hotel, Gardner had one of her best parts in Night of the Iguana (1964). She also had memorable turns in The Bible (1969) and The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972) before retiring from film in 1977. As her health began to fail, she became increasingly reclusive. In her London apartment, she died of pneumonia on January 25, 1990.

Further Reading
Fowler, Karin J. Ava Gardner: A Bio-Bibliography. New York: Greenwood Press, 1990.
Gardner, Ava. Ava: My Story. New York: Bantam Books, 1990.

Recommended Recorded and Videotaped Performances
The Killers (1946). Universal, VHS, 1998.
The Night of the Iguana (1964). Warner Home Video, VHS, 1992.
Show Boat (1951). Warner Home Video, DVD/VHS, 2000.

READ MORE - AVA GARDNER