A previous column saluted the great male character actors – this month, a look at the actresses who specialized in supporting roles in vintage films: the mothers, grandmothers, and matrons; landladies, secretaries, maids, and nurses; spinsters, gossips, harridans, and eccentrics; bad girls, earth mothers, and iron-willed women.  The films of the studio era are a museum of our images of women, both traditional and transitional.

Lest this sound too academic, they were the Movies, America’s night out back in the day, two or three nights a week for many families.  People wanted to laugh, cheer, and cry, and the character actresses were some of the magical players who made it happen.  Elsa Lanchester, hissing and bellowing as the Frankenstein monster’s bride; Mae Busch, hurling every plate, pan, and pitcher at Oliver Hardy’s head; Hattie McDaniel, laying down plantation society law to Scarlett, with vigorous nods of her head; Marjorie Main telling The Women about her husband’s courting days: “Them red-headed fellers, they’ve just got to get to the point!”; Billie Burke in a sweet, ditzy dither, in nearly every scene of every one of her films; these were exceptional talents in the dream factory.  Whether they were hearth and homestead types (Jane Darwell, Spring Byington) or hothouse exotics (Anna May Wong, Gale Sondergaard) these actresses s stood out in  a crowded field because they had stage presence, technique, and, many of them, boldly creative statements.

A skilled character actress who established her niche could freelance at any studio, from the majors to the tiny outfits like Tiffany and Monogram.  While leading ladies found the going tough after age 40, the character actresses who specialized in mature parts could work into their 80s, and a number of them did.  Mature actresses formed a wide and competitive field.  In the mother/grandmother division there were the sweet and winsome types: Mary Carr, Beryl Mercer, Emma Dunn, Clara Blandick, Fay Bainter, Spring Byington, Jane Darwell, Rosemary DeCamp.  May Robson played the knowing, sharp-tongued elder, a character that was also played, at times, by Lucile Watson and Gladys Cooper.  Elizabeth Risdon played cold-hearted aunts or matrons.  Hollywood’s spinsters were played by Margaret Hamilton (vindictive, grim-faced), Edna May Oliver (sweeping everyone before her), or Zasu Pitts and Nydia Westman, both of them specializing in ‘tetched’ roles.

Between them, Hattie McDaniel, Louise Beavers, Butterfly McQueen, Patsy Kelly, and Una O’Connor played maids and cooks in several hundred films.  Both McQueen and O’Connor had high-pitched voices and supplied comic screeching when needed (O’Connor, gloriously, in The Invisible Man).  Beavers’ and McDaniel’s filmographies reflect both the career path of the character actress and the limits imposed on black artists in the studio era. 

Because the studios depended on a mass audience that included the Jim Crow South, blacks were either omitted entirely from films or treated as figures of fun. In this setting, Louise Beavers and Hattie McDaniel, both radiant actresses with emotive styles and excellent diction, pursued their careers.

Beavers had a glowing softness; McDaniel was tart and direct.  Both had standout parts in films that should have defined their careers, Beavers in Imitation of Life (1934), as Delilah, the friend and business partner of Claudette Colbert, McDaniel in her triumphant portrayal of Gone with the Wind’s Mammy, for which she won the Oscar.  After these showcase roles, both actresses returned, for the most part, to the small parts they had done before.  McDaniel put a positive face on it.  She is quoted on the IMDb saying, “Why should I complain about making 00 a week playing a maid?  If I didn’t, I’d be making a week being one.”

Skilled comediennes were in demand in character parts.  Louise Fazenda, Alice Brady, Billie Burke, Mary Boland, and Cora Witherspoon played bird brains and chatterboxes, although Brady’s Oscar was for a dramatic role, in In Old Chicago (1938), and Witherspoon could put a sharp edge on her wives and matrons.  Mary Boland had some straight dramatic parts, notably in The Night of June 13 (1932), but she rules the screen in her comic roles.  Typically cast as the matriarch of a nutty family, she has her own agenda in every scene, pursuing some idiotically minor thought no matter what has befallen the other characters.

After decades on the stage, Boland had few equals at line readings.  To study her diction is to hear a master at work, with creative use of pitch and pacing.  She had a singsong delivery which could turn sharp to accuse or wheedle.  She picked certain lines to throw away as mutters.  Boland was a scene stealer.  She’s worth seeing in any film, but do not miss her in The Women (1939), as the Countess de Lave, the original cougar, who faces the loss of her stud muffin by moaning, “Oh, the publicity!  La Publicité!!” adding, “Bring me a bromide – and put some gin in it.”

A few comediennes defied the feminine stereotypes and played wild, rowdy women. At MGM, they were Polly Moran and Marie Dressler, although Dressler would leave the ranks of the character actresses and become the country’s number one box office star in 1932-33.  Mae Busch (to be discussed separately) achieved a special immortality, wreaking havoc on Laurel and Hardy.  Marjorie Rambeau played rough-edged women and reprised Dressler’s old Tugboat Annie role in 1940, in Tugboat Annie Sails Again.  Alison Skipworth played shifty, larcenous old dolls, sometimes with a weakness for the bottle.  She teamed several times with W.C. Fields, notably in Tillie and Gus (1933).

Glenda Farrell, Eve Arden, and Thelma Ritter deserve special recognition for their portrayal of the wisecracking female.  Farrell appeared in dozens of Warner Bros pictures, leveling her knowing eyes on would-be Romeos, ditzy chorus girls, and dimwitted mobsters, cutting them to size with her quips.  She was scalding.  Warner’s gave her the Torchy Blane series, in which she is a wisecracking reporter, but it’s better to catch Farrell in her supporting parts, in pictures like Gold Diggers of 1935, where her role is shorter but punchier.

Eve Arden delighted audiences in the 40s with her sarcastic lines, delivered with a lilting voice.  Mildred Pierce (1945) gave her a choice part and some classic lines, i.e., “Personally, Veda’s convinced me that alligators have the right idea.  They eat their young.”  Thelma Ritter entered films in 1947 and spent her forties and fifties playing a gallery of sharp-witted women: as Birdie in All About Eve (1950), who sees through Eve from the very start, as John Lund’s exasperating mother in The Mating Season (1951), as Stella, the worldly nurse in Rear Window (1954), and key roles in such films as The Model and the Marriage Broker (1951), Pickup on South Street (1953), A Hole in the Head (1959), and The Misfits (1961).  She was Oscar-nominated six times but never won.

A few actresses took on sinister roles, but sporadically, for the field of truly evil villainess parts was sparse.  Lucille La Verne played hags in silent and early sound pictures.  She is at her best menacing the Gish sisters in Griffith’s Orphans of the Storm (1921).  Gale Sondergaard won an Oscar playing a scheming temptress in Anthony Adverse (1936), her first film.  Her roles tended toward the eccentric; she was expert at insinuating bitterness with her smile.  Her flashiest role was as the Chinese widow who confronts murderess Bette Davis in The Letter (1940).  Margaret Wycherly had impressive range.  She was Oscar-nominated for her role as Gary Cooper’s long-suffering backwoods mother in Sergeant York (1941).  Eight years later she turned in a full-blooded performance as the psychotic Ma Jarrett in Cagney’s White Heat (1949).  Her eyes glow as her son rises in the underworld, and we realize she is the reason he’s a thief and murderer.  Wycherly’s portrayal of an evil, domineering mother is creepy – with her purring voice and demented stare she gives off an aura of menace and griminess.

Equally brilliant in a one-off performance as a possessive mother is Madam Constantine in Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946).  After a long career in German films, this was Constantine’s only Hollywood assignment.  She was repelled by the character she played, but she’s mesmerizing in the film.  In a key scene, her son (Claude Rains, as a fugitive Nazi – wonderful) wakes her in the dead of night to confess, “I am married to an American agent.”  Few moments in all of Hitchcock match the sleek villainy of Constantine’s response.  With her face a humorless mask, she flips open her cigarette case, sticks one in the corner of her mouth, and fires it up.

The 6’2” Hope Emerson is a truly frightening figure in Caged (1950), as a sadistic prison guard.  Emerson was only tall but muscular, and did not make many films.  Caged, for which she received an Oscar nomination, has lodged her in the memory of many fans.

With the great character actors, one is tempted to describe in detail, because they were unique and gave fine-tuned performances.  Many of them had signature gestures, expressions, or inflections.  Here are a few notes on six great actresses who continue to delight audiences.

(James Whitmore, Marjorie Main in Mrs. O´Malley and Mr. Malone, 1950)

Billie Burke (1884-1970) was on stage from age 18, debuted on Broadway in 1906, and had a successful career in the teens in theater and silent film, capped by her marriage to Florenz Ziegfeld.  She retired in the early 20s, only to be wiped out in the stock market crash.  She returned to Hollywood for the miraculous second act of her career, appearing in over 60 features and leaving behind a complete record of her performing style.  She played dithering, wildly excitable society women, and with her china doll face and melodious voice, she was ageless.  Casual buffs who know her only as Glinda, the good witch of the North, are surprised to learn that was nearly a 40-year veteran of stage and screen when she played the part.  Burke’s characters often spoke so rapidly that they outran their train of thought, and her rippling delivery was close to song.  When she is tumbling through run-on dialogue, it is easy to lose the sense of the words, and to simply marvel at her voice.  The role that best exercised her comic vitality was the society hostess in Dinner at Eight (1933).

Mae Busch (1897-1946) was on stage at age 13 and in films from about 1919, playing seductresses for Von Stroheim, followed by ten years as a general purpose actress in marital comedies and dramas.  She showed a flair for playing troubled women, and with sound, her strident voice brought her a new career as comic foil to Laurel and Hardy.  Her 12 L&H films immortalized her.  She is Hardy’s terrorist wife in four of the films, and various floozies and hard-drinking harridans in the others.  In Oliver the Eighth (1934), she’s a psycho who goes into man-killing trances.  In Come Clean (1931), she shows up at Hardy’s office to blackmail him with pictures from their old affair.  She dismisses a curious Laurel by barking a two-syllable “S-cram!” at him.  Later in the film, Laurel makes the bad decision to go one-on-one with her, which results in an apartment-wrecking fight that ends up on the sidewalk.  Fourteen minutes into Sons of the Desert (1933), the quintessential L & H feature, there’s a classic Mae moment.  Waving a chef’s knife in Hardy’s face, she dashes his plans to attend a lodge convention with a truly nasty laugh: “HAH-Ha!”  This is also the film where she refers to him as an ‘inflated tadpole.’  Busch’s post-L & H career was a disappointing series of bit parts.  She should be experienced at her rampaging peak with Stan and Ollie.

Beulah Bondi (1889-1981) was the polar opposite of Busch’s hard women.  Best known for playing mothers, aunts, and grandmothers, Bondi played nurturers without getting sticky.  Millions know her as Jimmy Stewart’s mother in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946).  It’s instructive to note how bitter she is in the film’s fantasy sequence.  Bondi was persuasive in both modes, and in her earliest films she played unattractive women.  In Street Scene (1931), she’s the neighborhood gossip, hanging outside the tenement, scratching herself, going on about the heat and about her neighbors’ affairs.  It’s a portrayal of a malevolent, unhygienic woman, and it’s vital.  In Rain (1932), she’s the small-minded missionary’s wife, unable to live a charitable life and destroyed by her husband’s downfall.  Had her career ended there, Bondi would join Margaret Hamilton in a sisterhood of spite.  But ahead were the heartbreaking Make Way for Tomorrow (1937), her first two stints as James Stewart’s sacrificing ma (Of Human Hearts, 1938, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, 1939), and Mother Webb in Our Town (1940).  She could do it all, but she was many a director’s top choice for idealized motherhood.

Kathleen Howard (1879-1956) took an unusual path to the screen.  After a successful stage and recording career as a mezzo soprano, she took up acting as a midlife pursuit and spent her fifties and sixties playing snooty society matrons.  Her genius was playing straight woman as wild comic events unwound around her; her burning anger and outraged declamations were priceless.  Howard’s diction was emphatic.  At the high point of a tirade she would wag her head, bear down on her cadence so that each word came out like a hammer beat, and trill her r’s like an empress.  In the 1940s, her parts got smaller, and she did some Hal Roach streamliners that were blatant slapstick: Howard sprayed with a hose or splattered with paint.  W. C. Fields gave Howard her best parts in a trio of films that came early in her Hollywood career.

In You’re Telling Me (1934), she’s Mrs. Murchison, a club woman who looks down on Fields, the black sheep in town, until a visiting princess snubs her and befriends Fields.  In It’s a Gift (1934) and Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935), she plays his wife, and has a lot more to do.  Fields realized the wonderful chemistry he could have by playing his messy, shiftless, character off Howard’s iceberg sternness.  It’s a Gift gives her the most lines, and she and the film are incomparable.  There’s a scene with the two of them preparing for bed on a summer night, Howard going on and on about her disappointments in life, and Fields pretending to listen but clearly tired of a speech he’s heard before.  Fields and Howard create a relentless portrayal of a marriage that has come down to a bickering match.  It’s a shame they didn’t reteam after Fields’ hiatus from movies in 1937-38.  She enhanced his comedy just as the wonderful Margaret Dumont enhanced the Marx Brothers’ films.

Margaret Hamilton (1902-1985) was a warm-hearted, outgoing lady, and a kindergarten teacher in her twenties, but her face and her uniquely drilling voice set the course for her Hollywood career.  There was no nonsense about Hamilton.  She was afraid of no one and often had scenes cutting men down to size.  Her speech was rapid, and she usually had a catalogue to grievances to deliver.  She played spinsters, landladies, shop owners, and farm wives.  In Nothing Sacred (1937), she gets so boisterous telling off Fredric March that she lands a little spit in his eye.  (He does the same to her at the end of the scene.)

In the sound remake of Way Down East (1935), she’s Martha, the town gossip, who learns the secret that will send the heroine (Rochelle Hudson) out into the storm.  There are comic tracking shots of Hamilton power-walking out to the squire’s house, her face bursting with the anticipatory joy of undelivered gossip.  In Stablemates (1938) she’s out to angle Wallace Beery into marriage; like most women in Beery’s films, she’s his adversary.  They make a great team.  The Wizard of Oz (1939) is her quintessential film and gave her the most screen time.  As Miss Gulch and the Wicked Witch, she has become part of our shared cultural heritage.

Marjorie Main (1890-1975) almost always played a rangy, good-humored gal who could hold her own with the men folk.  She was folksy, with a rough-toned voice that could rise to circular saw abrasiveness when she was excited.  Her breakthrough role was atypical.  She played the mother of Baby Face Martin (Humphrey Bogart) in Dead End (1937), a part she had played on Broadway.  In one wrenching scene she slaps his face for breaking her heart by becoming a public enemy.  Her shrieks at the film’s violent climax are disturbing.  Producers quickly found another side to Marjorie, the comic hoyden, and variations on this character kept her busy for twenty years.  She’s in The Women as Lucy, the salty manager at the divorcees’ ranch.

The next year, MGM began using her as a successor to Marie Dressler by teaming her with Wallace Beery in a string of seven comic adventures.  Among the better entries are Jackass Mail (1942), with décolleté shots of Marjorie in saloon girl’s get-up, and Rationing (1944), a neat little topical picture.  In 1947, in The Egg and I, came the capstone role of Marjorie’s career, Ma Kettle, which she understood thoroughly.  She was Oscar-nominated for Egg and played Ma in a total of ten features.  Marjorie will never go out of style, for she had the magical know-how of all great character actors: get on, get to the point, do your stuff, get off.  Always leave ‘em wanting more.