Mary Astor was born in 1906 and died in 1988. Though best known as the conniving killer in The Maltese Falcon (1941), the actress had a long and tempestuous career that began in the silent era and lasted until the mid-1960s. Mary Astor was best at playing hard-hearted double-crossers but later made a career of playing sweet old mothers; her versatility was admirable. For the most part, she worked as a featured player, commanding attention in strong supporting roles, consciously choosing to remain a working actress rather than trying to become a superstar - a decision that probably accounts for her longevity.
Born Lucille Vasconcellos Langhanke, she was the daughter of two schoolteachers. Contrary to the usual stereotype of the stage mother who pushes her daughter into show business, Mary Astor had a stage father. He was sure he could turn his pretty young child into a movie star, and he was right. Despite a failed screen test for D. W. Griffith, her father helped her find her way into the movies with a bit part in Sentimental Tommy (1921). Her career progressed slowly until John Barrymore insisted that she be his leading lady in Beau Brummel (1924). Mary Astor and Barrymore became lovers (without any help from Mr. Langhanke), and the actress became a burgeoning star.
She played opposite Barrymore again in Don Juan (1926), but she also appeared on the silent screen with a number of other major stars, including DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS in Don Q, Son of Zorro (1925) and George Bancroft and Charles Farrell in The Rough Riders (1927). With her beauty and poise, she seemed destined for a great career in the cinema. But then came sound, and Mary Astor, inexplicably, did poorly in a talkie screen test. Convinced she didn't have a future in Hollywood, no studio offered her a job until she had a hit in a Los Angeles area stage show for which she received excellent reviews. Suddenly, she was in demand again.
Mary Astor worked steadily during the early and mid-1930s in a host of films for several different studios. The best of the lot were Red Dust (1932), in which she played opposite CLARK GABLE and JEAN HARLOW, and The Kennel Murder Case (1933) with WILLIAM POWELL. In many of her other films during this period, she was either a featured player or a lead in “B” movies - until 1936 when she was involved in a nasty child custody case with her second husband. Information from her personal diary, leaked to the press by her husband's attorney, detailed a wild sex life (her descriptions of the sexual prowess of playwright George S. Kaufman made for particularly tantalizing reading).
The scandal was front-page news throughout the world, and it might have destroyed her career had she not already finished playing a major role in Dodsworth (1936), a critical and box-office hit. She followed that with two more winners in quick succession: The Prisoner of Zenda (1937) and The Hurricane (1937). During the latter years of the decade, she had begun to build her reputation for playing two-faced characters in films such as Woman Against Woman (1938), Midnight (1939), and her Oscar-winning Best Supporting Actress performance opposite BETTE DAVIS in The Great Lie (1941). But Mary Astor later wrote in one of her autobiographies, A Life on Film, that she wished she had won the award that year for playing Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon, the role of a lying, murderous woman who uses sex to get her way.
Though she appeared to be typecast as a schemer and a liar, Mary Astor surprised audiences and critics alike with her charming comic performance in PRESTON STURGES's masterful farce, Palm Beach Story (1942), after which she soon found herself switching into saccharine matronly roles in films such as Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), Claudia and David (1946), Cass Timberlane (1947), and Little Women (1949). She did, however, finally get an opportunity to show her feisty personality in Act of Violence (1949), in which she played an aging tart.
Tired of the otherwise insipid roles she was given, Mary Astor begged out of her contract at MGM and the studio obliged. Except for occasional TV shows during the 1950s and a relative handful of minor film roles, Mary Astor's career was winding down. She had a last hurrah during the early 1960s when she gave a strong performance in Return to Peyton Place (1961). Thanks to her good reviews, she had a small flurry of interesting, meaty parts in films such as Youngblood Hawke (1964) and Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1965). But in the later 1960s, with the success of two volumes of memoirs and several novels, she finally retired from the screen.
Our website is not responsible for the information contained by this article. Webworldarticles.com is a free articles resource thus practically any visitor can submit an article. However if you notice any copyrighted material, please contact us and we will remove the article(s) in discussion right away.
This article was sent to us by:
Roger S. Wattsen at
04062010
1. The work of Alan Arking in the show business world
All articles in this directory are property of their respective authors. Additionally, read our Privacy Policy
© 2010 WebWorldarticles.com - All Rights Reserved.