He decided to take a chance on a complete unknown, and she was cast in over 20 Westerns in a two-year period. Arthur commenting on her unsuccessful film career in 1928.Ĭhange came when one day she showed up at the lot of Action Pictures, which produced B Westerns, and impressed its owner Lester F. That's the worst of this business, everyone is such a good promisor. But it took me a long time to get over hoping, and believing, people's promises. Anybody that sticks it out in Hollywood for four years is bound to change in self-defense. I've had to learn to be a different person since I've been out here. It isn't a bad idea to get angry and chew up the scenery. It would have been better business if I cried in front of the producers. Her brother Albert died in 1926 as a result of respiratory injuries suffered during a mustard gas attack during World War I. Both her father (at age 55, claiming to be 45) and siblings registered for the draft. Presaging many of her later film roles, she worked as a stenographer on Bond Street in lower Manhattan during and after World War I. Gladys dropped out of high school in her junior year due to a "change in family circumstances". Hill's photographic studio on Fifth Avenue. Relocating in 1915 to New York City, the family settled in the Washington Heights neighborhood – at 573 West 159th Street – of upper Manhattan, and Hubert worked at Ira L. The Greenes lived on and off in Westbrook, Maine, from 1908 to 1915 while Gladys's father worked at Lamson Studios in Portland. The product of a nomadic childhood, the future Jean Arthur lived at times in Saranac Lake, New York Jacksonville, Florida, where George Woodward, Hubert's Plattsburgh employer, opened a second studio and Schenectady, New York, where Hubert had grown up and where several members of his family still lived. Two and a half years later, Johanna gave birth to Gladys. Johanna gave birth to stillborn twins on April 1, 1898. Around 1897, Hubert moved his wife and three sons from Billings to Plattsburgh, NY, so he could work as a photographer at the Woodward Studios on Clinton Street. Gladys's three older brothers-Donald Hubert Greene, Robert Brazier Greene, and Albert Sidney Greene -were born in the West. Johanna and Hubert were married in Billings, Montana, on July 7, 1890. Albans, Vermont, where his great-grandson, Hubert Greene, was born. During the 1790s, Nathaniel Greene helped found the town of St. Her Congregationalist paternal ancestors immigrated from England to Rhode Island in the second half of the 1600s. Gladys' Lutheran maternal grandparents immigrated from Norway to the American West after the Civil War. Early life Īrthur was born Gladys Georgianna Greene in Plattsburgh, New York, to Protestant parents, Johanna Augusta Nelson and Hubert Sidney Greene.
Life magazine observed in a 1940 article: "Next to Garbo, Jean Arthur is Hollywood's reigning mystery woman." As well as recoiling from interviews, after a certain age she avoided photographers and refused to become a part of any kind of publicity. Like Greta Garbo, Arthur was well known in Hollywood for her aversion to publicity she rarely signed autographs or granted interviews. Her last film performance was non-comedic, playing the homesteader's wife in George Stevens's Shane in 1953. So much was she part of it, so much was her star personality defined by it, that the screwball style itself seems almost unimaginable without her." She has been called "the quintessential comedic leading lady". James Harvey wrote in his history of the romantic comedy: "No one was more closely identified with the screwball comedy than Jean Arthur. Arthur was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress in 1944 for her performance in The More the Merrier (1943), a comedy which also starred Joel McCrea. She starred as the lead in the acclaimed and highly successful comedy films The Devil and Miss Jones (1941) and A Foreign Affair (1948), the latter of which she starred alongside Marlene Dietrich. She also co-starred with Cary Grant in the adventure-drama Only Angels Have Wings (1939) and in the comedy-drama The Talk of the Town (1942). These three films all championed the "everyday heroine", personified by Arthur. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), also starring Stewart. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) with Gary Cooper, You Can't Take It with You (1938) co-starring James Stewart, and Mr. Jean Arthur (born Gladys Georgianna Greene Octo– June 19, 1991) was an American Broadway and film actress whose career began in silent films in the early 1920s and lasted until the early 1950s.Īrthur had feature roles in three Frank Capra films: Mr.
0 kommentar(er)
