Margaret Sullavan
Margaret Brooke Sullavan was an American stage and film actress. She began her career onstage in 1929 with the University Players on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. In 1933, she caught the attention of film director John M. Stahl and made her screen debut that same year in Only Yesterday. She continued to be successful on stage and film, best known for The Shop Around the Corner.
Sullavan preferred working on the stage and made only 16 films, four of which were opposite close friend James Stewart in a popular partnership that included The Mortal Storm and The Shop Around the Corner. Stewart and Sullavan were also close friends of Henry Fonda, to whom Sullavan was married from 1931 to 1933. She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in Three Comrades. In the early 1940s, she retired from the screen to devote herself to her children and stage work. She returned to the screen in 1950 to make her last film, No Sad Songs for Me, in which she played a woman dying of cancer. For the rest of her career, she appeared only on the stage. Popular stage portrayals included Terry Randall in Stage Door, Sally Middleton in The Voice of the Turtle and Sabrina Fairchild in Sabrina Fair.
Early life
Sullavan was born May 16, 1909, in Norfolk, Virginia, the daughter of a wealthy stockbroker, Cornelius Sullavan, and his wife, Garland Councill Sullavan. She had a younger brother, Cornelius, and a half-sister, Louise "Weedie" Gregory. The first years of her childhood were spent isolated from other children. She suffered from a painful muscular weakness in the legs that prevented her from walking, so that she was unable to socialize with other children until the age of six. After her recovery she emerged as an adventurous and tomboyish child who preferred playing with children from a poorer neighborhood, much to the disapproval of her class-conscious parents. Her first dance performances were at Sunday school at St. Andrew's Episcopal Church.She attended boarding school at Chatham Episcopal Institute, in Chatham, Virginia, where she was president of the student body and delivered the salutatory oration in 1927. Sullavan moved to Boston and lived with her half-sister, Weedie, while she studied dance at the Boston Denishawn studio and drama at the Copley Theatre. When her parents cut her allowance to a minimum, Sullavan defiantly paid her way by working as a clerk in the Harvard Cooperative Bookstore, located in Harvard Square, Cambridge.
Career
Early years
Sullavan succeeded in getting a chorus part in the Harvard Dramatic Society 1929 spring production Close Up, a musical written by Harvard senior Bernard Hanighen, who was later a composer for Broadway and Hollywood.The President of the Harvard Dramatic Society, Charles Leatherbee, along with the President of Princeton's Theatre Intime, Bretaigne Windust, who together had established the University Players on Cape Cod the summer before, persuaded Sullavan to join them for their second summer season. Another member of the University Players was Henry Fonda, who had the comic lead in Close Up.
In the summer of 1929, Sullavan appeared opposite Fonda in The Devil in the Cheese, her debut on the professional stage. She returned for most of the University Players' 1930 season. In 1931, she squeezed in one production with the University Players between the closing of the Broadway production of A Modern Virgin in July and its tour in September. She rejoined the University Players for most of their 18-week 1930–31 winter season in Baltimore.
Sullavan's parents did not approve of her choice of career. She played the lead in Strictly Dishonorable by Preston Sturges, which her parents attended. Confronted with her evident talent, they ceased their objections. "To my deep relief," Sullavan later recalled, "I thought I'd have to put up with their yappings on the subject forever."
A Shubert scout saw her in that play as well and eventually she met Lee Shubert himself. At the time, Sullavan was suffering from a bad case of laryngitis and her voice was huskier than usual. Shubert loved it. In subsequent years Sullavan would joke that she cultivated that "laryngitis" into a permanent hoarseness by standing in every available draft.
Sullavan made her debut on Broadway in A Modern Virgin on May 20, 1931, and began touring on August 3.
At one point in 1932, she starred in four Broadway flops in a row, but the critics praised Sullavan for her performances in all of them. In March 1933, Sullavan replaced another actor in Dinner at Eight in New York. Movie director John M. Stahl happened to be watching the play and was intrigued by Sullavan. He decided she would be perfect for a picture he was planning, Only Yesterday.
At that time Sullavan had already turned down offers for five-year contracts from Paramount and Columbia. Universal Pictures offered Sullavan a three-year, two-pictures-per-year contract at $1,200 per week. She accepted it and had a clause put in her contract that allowed her to return to the stage on occasion. Later in her career, Sullavan signed only short-term contracts because she did not want to be "owned" by any studio.
Hollywood
Sullavan arrived in Hollywood on May 16, 1933, her 24th birthday. Her film debut came that same year in Only Yesterday. When she saw herself in the film's early rushes, she was so appalled that she tried to purchase her contract for $2,500, but Universal refused. In his November 10, 1933, review in The New York Herald Tribune, Richard Watts, Jr. wrote that Sullavan "plays the tragic and lovelorn heroine of this shrewdly sentimental orgy with such forthright sympathy, wise reticence and honest feeling that she establishes herself with some definiteness as one of the cinema people to be watched."Sullavan's next role came in Little Man, What Now?, a film about a couple struggling to survive in impoverished post–World War I Germany. Universal was reluctant to produce a film about unemployment, starvation and homelessness, but Little Man was an important project to Sullavan. She would list the film appearance among the few Hollywood roles that afforded her a great measure of satisfaction.
In The Good Fairy, Sullavan was able to illustrate her versatility. During the production, she married its director, William Wyler.
King Vidor's So Red the Rose dealt with people in the postbellum South and preceded the publication of Margaret Mitchell's bestselling novel Gone With the Wind by one year and the blockbuster film adaptation by four years. Sullavan played a childish Southern belle who matures into a responsible woman.
In Next Time We Love, Sullavan played opposite the then-unknown James Stewart. She had been campaigning for Stewart to be her leading man, and the studio complied for fear that she would stage a threatened strike. The film dealt with a married couple who had grown apart over the years. This was the first of four films made by Sullavan and Stewart together.
In the comedy The Moon's Our Home, Sullavan played opposite her ex-husband Henry Fonda as a newly married couple. Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell were recruited to improve the script's dialogue, reportedly at Sullavan's insistence. Her seventh film, Three Comrades, is a drama set in post–World War I Germany. She gained an Oscar nomination for her role and was named the year's best actress by the New York Film Critics Circle.
Sullavan reunited with Stewart in The Shopworn Angel. Stewart played a sweet, naive Texan soldier on his way to fight in World War I who first marries Sullavan. Sullavan's ninth film was The Shining Hour, in which she played the suicidal sister-in-law of Joan Crawford's character. Crawford insisted on the casting of Sullavan even though Louis B. Mayer warned Crawford that Sullavan could steal the picture from her. In The Shop Around the Corner, Sullavan and Stewart worked together again, playing colleagues who unknowingly exchange letters with each other.
In 1940, Sullavan also appeared in The Mortal Storm, a film about the lives of ordinary Germans during the rise of Adolf Hitler; it was her last film with Stewart. Back Street was lauded as among the best performances of Sullavan's Hollywood career, a film for which she ceded top billing to Charles Boyer to ensure that he would take the male lead part. So Ends Our Night was a wartime drama in which Sullavan, on loan to United Artists for a one-picture deal from Universal, played a Jewish exile fleeing the Nazis.
A 1940 court decision obliged Sullavan to fulfill her original 1933 agreement with Universal, requiring her to appear in two more films for the studio. These films would be Back Street and the light comedy Appointment for Love.
Cry 'Havoc' was Sullavan's last film with M-G-M. After its completion, she was free of all film commitments. She had often referred to MGM and Universal as "jails."
Films with James Stewart
Sullavan's co-starring roles with James Stewart are among the highlights of their early careers. In 1935, Sullavan had decided on doing Next Time We Love. She had strong reservations about the story, but had to "work-off the damned contract." The script contained a role that she thought might be ideal for Stewart, who was the best friend of Sullavan's first husband, actor Henry Fonda. Years earlier, during a casual conversation with some fellow actors on Broadway, Sullavan predicted that Stewart would become a major Hollywood star.By 1936, Stewart was a contract player at MGM but securing only small parts in B-movies. Sullavan, under contract with Universal, suggested that the studio test Stewart as her leading man. He was borrowed from MGM to star with Sullavan in Next Time We Love. The inexperienced Stewart had been nervous and unsure of himself during the early stages of production, and director Edward H. Griffith, began bullying him. However, Sullavan believed in Stewart and spent evenings coaching him and helping him scale down his awkward mannerisms and hesitant speech that were soon to be famous. "It was Margaret Sullavan who made James Stewart a star," Griffith later said. Bill Grady of MGM said: "That boy came back from Universal so changed I hardly recognized him." Gossip in Hollywood held that Sullavan's husband William Wyler was suspicious about her rehearsing with Stewart privately. When Sullavan divorced Wyler in 1936 and married Leland Hayward that same year, they moved into a colonial house just a block away from that of Stewart. Stewart's frequent visits to the Sullavan/Hayward home soon restoked the rumors of his romantic feelings for Sullavan.
Sullavan and Stewart's second film together was The Shopworn Angel. Walter Pidgeon, who also starred in the film, later recalled: "I really felt like the odd-man-out in that one. It was really all Jimmy and Maggie... It was so obvious he was in love with her. He came absolutely alive in his scenes with her, playing with a conviction and a sincerity I never knew him to summon away from her." Sullavan and Stewart appeared in four films together between 1936 and 1940.