In honor of the birthday of Mary Astor (who would have been 104 today), one of the loveliest, most skilled, and most protean of Hollywood leading ladies, here’s the description from her autobiography of the five phases of Hollywood stardom:
- Who’s Mary Astor?
- Get me Mary Astor!
- Get me a Mary Astor type.
- What we need is a young Mary Astor.
- Who’s Mary Astor?
You may remember her as the marvelous villainess Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon opposite Humphrey Bogart, Judy Garland’s mother in Meet Me in St. Louis, the noble “other woman” in Dodsworth or any of the dozens of great roles she had over the years from her first movie role 1921 until her final role in Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte in 1964.
If you don’t remember her, look her up. She was one of those rare performers who raised the quality of any movie simply by being in it. Many of the films she appeared in are classics. Red Dust, The Prisoner of Zenda, Midnight, The Great Lie, The Palm Beach Story. The list goes on and on.
She certainly wasn’t a beauty in the classic, Hollywood, Jean Harlow tradition. Today, she’d be classified as a highly accomplished character actress. And that’s not bad at all. (BTW, if anyone ever entertains the notion of becoming a film actor, strive to become a really good character actor — your chances of survival in the industry are much greater.)
Damn, speaking of fine actresses, I see that Lynn Redgrave passed away.
sam, you might want to take a look at a few younger pictures of Mary Astor. There’s her appearance with Barrymore in Don Juan, for example. It’s not that she wasn’t beautiful, for goodness sake. She wasn’t as cheap looking as Harlowe.
True enough, Dave, but I think her reputation was really established by her later films, eg The Maltese Falcon, when that early beauty has faded, or perhaps ‘matured’ is a better word. But these are matters of perception and taste, I suppose. Few people, maybe only old movie buffs (the ambiguity is intended :)) know that Lillian Gish was also quite beautiful when she was younger, but I think she’s more known now for her later work in talkies, when youth had flown. (“Talkies!” Jesus!!) Anyway….