The Film Experience

by Brent Calderwood

Juanita Moore lived to be 99 but she's immortal via her Oscar-nominated classic

In case you were wondering, today marks the 2021 due date to submit nominations for the Hollywood Walk of Fame. More importantly, it also marks the third year in a row that Juanita Moore has been nominated. Each year the selection committee chooses about 20 winners from among 200 or so nominees, and for the past two years, Moore has been passed over, despite her Oscar-nominated performance in 1959’s Imitation of Life, and despite the annual efforts of her nephew Arnett Moore. Here’s hoping that this will finally be Juanita Moore’s year.

In 1959, Juanita Moore earned nearly unanimous praise for her star turn in Imitation of Life. Moore plays Annie Johnson, the Black mother of a light-skinned daughter, Sarah Jane, who is assumed by her classmates to be white...

Annie meets, befriends, and ends up working for Lora Meredith (Lana Turner), a white, aspiring actress who is also a single mother. Her equally blond daughter, Susie, is about the same age as Sarah Jane. It’s a setup that’s ripe for a look at race at the dawn of the American Civil Rights Movement, five years after Brown v. Board of Education and five years prior to the March on Washington.

German émigré Director Douglas Sirk pulled out all the stops for his final American film, applying his trademark outsider perspective, his genius for heightened emotionalism, and his painterly use of color to shine light on big subjects—gender roles, class, economics, and especially race. It ended up being arguably his best film.

Mother & Daughter Oscar nominations for "Imitation of Life"

Unlike many Hollywood films that have trouble looking squarely at race even today, Imitation of Life doesn’t reduce racism to one invective-spewing Southern sheriff in a sea of white saviors. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Imitation of Life has only one full-bore violent racist, and that’s an almost-cameo by scrubbed heartthrob Troy Donahue, 1959’s embodiment of all-American young (white) manhood. But as always in Sirk’s America, the real enemy is inside the home, and it’s almost everyone: It’s Lora, who gives Annie and her daughter a place to live but hasn’t met any of Annie’s friends in 18 years; it’s Susie, played in the second half by perky Sandra Dee, who loves her almost-sister Sarah Jane but seems more concerned with having a pony and daydreaming in her bigger bedroom; it’s Lora’s boyfriend (John Gavin) and colleagues, who admire and even love Annie but take the upstairs-downstairs dynamic as a given. Most tragically it's even Sarah Jane as she grows up (Susan Kohner) the product of a dominant culture that sees her and especially her mother as second class, she runs away to live as a white woman with an ersatz version of Lora’s stage success, and this becomes the film’s most powerful storyline. And that’s why Moore and Kohner came away with the film’s only Oscar nominations, both for Best Supporting Actress (they lost to Shelley Winters in The Diary of Anne Frank).

In addition to being helmed by Sirk, one of the other master strokes of this adaptation of the 1933 novel (previously filmed in 1934 with Claudette Colbert) is also a change that saves it from being a historical curiosity or a cringe-fest. In a new twist on the title, this Imitation of Life makes Lana Turner an aspiring actress. First of all, that makes Lora’s Lana-ness feel believable. More importantly, it acknowledges and owns the fact that the film itself is a meta narrative about why-is-Lana-Turner-top-billed-when-clearly-Juanita-Moore-is-the-beating-heart-of-this-movie?

Juanita Moore’s Oscar nomination made her the fifth Black actor ever to be nominated for an Oscar, but it didn’t lead to bigger and better parts. If the Walk of Fame selection committee and the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce are looking for more examples of Moore’s work, it’s true they’ll encounter many uncredited roles as servants and “domestics.” However, like Theresa Harris, Juano Hernández and many other actors of color who are overdue for mainstream recognition, Moore always played real human beings and refused to perform broad stereotypes.

Juanita Moore in "Affair in Trinidad"

If you’re looking to see Moore in more substantial parts, well, just as is the case with many actors of color to this day, you might want to look into her television roles. I would also suggest seeking out any movie roles that fall under noir. Broadly speaking, since film noirs weren’t in the business of propping up the American Dream or making their (mostly) white male heroes look good, films in this category tend to age better overall in their depictions of race, gender, and sexuality. So for instance, in the excellent Women’s Prison (1955), yes, Moore plays a prisoner, but so do her wonderful costars Audrey Totter, Jan Sterling, and Phyllis Thaxter—they’re all up against the same enemy, the deliciously evil warden played by Ida Lupino. Even better is Affair in Trinidad, a 1952 post-Gilda repairing of Rita Hayworth and Glen Ford. Moore plays a domestic servant but she gets lots of screen time with both stars and is the film’s voice of reason without any cringey “magical” overtones. Off-screen, Moore was close friends and confidantes with Hayworth, whose own superstardom came partly at the price of downplaying her Mexican heritage and lightening her hair and complexion; you can tell watching Affair in Trinidad that Hayworth and Moore enjoyed working together.

If I had a time machine and were in charge of casting, I’d like to go back and recast some of these films. How about giving Juanita Moore top billing in Imitation of Life (she’s seventh-billed on most of the posters!): Moore plays the struggling actress whose career is finally able to advance when her self-sacrificing friend played by Lana Turner moves in and becomes the primary caregiver for both women’s daughters. Or instead of Moore’s uncredited role as a beauty spa attendant with a few throwaway lines in The Opposite Sex (an otherwise surprisingly delightful 1956 musical remake of The Women), how about making Moore the star? June Allyson is miscast as the socialite protagonist anyway, but she would be a standout as a plucky spa attendant in this time-machine version.

I would have loved to have met Moore, but if I were casting her last taped interview, I wouldn’t cast myself as her interviewer. There are some excellent videos of Moore online, especially an invaluable 46-minute interview done in 1998 by the folks at Turner Classic Movies. Moore’s warmth and intelligence shine bright, but I suspect that an African American interviewer might have asked franker questions about race and evinced even more revealing responses. And speaking of fantasy casting: If I were casting a Walk of Fame selection committee, it would be a diverse chorus of voices, and mine would be just one. But we’d all be saying Hey, this is a no-brainer—give this woman her star!