The Supporting Actress Smackdown of 1946 is fast approaching, and with it comes one of the most head-scratching lineups in the category's history. To call this bunch of films, performances, and legacies problematic is to undersell just how much racial insensitivity plays into this particular Oscar race. Still, what complicates matters further is that the nominated actresses are all artists with considerable talent, superlative careers – most of whom started on stage – and undeniable historical importance. Unpacking all this mess is too great a task, but I'll try to introduce you, dear readers, to this impressive quintet of Old Hollywood thespians...
ETHEL BARRYMORE (1879-1959)
Part of the famous Barrymore acting dynasty, Ethel Barrymore was born to stage performers and quickly grew into the profession herself, though she was initially reluctant to do so. Ethel had dreamed of being a pianist in her youth, but the acting business proved more reliable. At the dawn of a new century, she could already call herself an experienced theater actress who had performed on both sides of the Atlantic. By 1919, when Barrymore was a strong supporter of the Actor's Equity Strike, she had achieved the reputation of a grande dame of the stage. A thespian whose name inspired awe, her strong convictions and willingness to experiment were artistic and political, daring to play gender-bent roles and defending the rights of performing arts professionals. It's fair to say that, regardless of her later success on the silver screen, the stage was Ethel Barrymore's true home.
That is especially evident when one compares her incursion into cinema with her family members' professional paths. Brothers John and Lionel were especially quick to find success in motion pictures, while Ethel dallied behind, doing occasional appearances while never committing to a career in Hollywood. She did some silent work during the 1910s but came to abandon any celluloid dreams she might have had during the roaring twenties. It was only when age started to deprive her of theatrical opportunities that Barrymore followed her siblings into the heart of Tinsel Town. Her first talkie, Rasputin and the Empress, remains the only film to feature the three Barrymores, each actor trying to upstage their costars throughout the entire production.
While chewing the scenery with such voraciousness, it's a miracle the sets didn't collapse, the siblings also helped each other. Through brotherly advice, Ethel Barrymore devised the whispery soft-voiced delivery that would come to characterize all of her screen performances, an antithesis to the type of voice work required on stage. The 40s marked her final and most absolute attempt at a movie career, prompting a short but rich filmography full of wise old ladies. Barrymore won an Academy Award in 1944 for her supporting turn in None But the Lonely Heart and kept regularly working in film until she died in 1959. Ethel Barrymore injected pathos into every screen role, even when the pictures she starred in were beneath her.
Essential Viewing: Rasputin and the Empress (1932), None But the Lonely Heart (1944), The Paradine Case (1947), Portrait of Jennie (1948), Pinky (1949).
ANNE BAXTER (1923-1985)
Born in Michigan City to a well-to-do family, Anne Baxter was the granddaughter of famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright. However, the future Oscar-winner's artistic pursuits never really found their way into the world of design. Instead, from a young age, Baxter was fascinated by the craft of acting. When she was five, the family moved to New York, and it was there that the little girl became dazzled by the movies and the great entertainers she saw on stage. Reportedly, eeing Helen Hayes perform convinced Baxter to pursue acting as her life's purpose. By the age of 13, Anne Baxter had graduated from humble school plays to the Broadway stages, where she studied under Maria Ouspenskaya.
In 1939, Baxter almost played Katharine Hepburn's little sister in the original production of The Philadelphia Story. However, thanks to the older actress' dislike, Baxter was replaced before the show made it to Broadway. Around this time, she also tested for the role of second Mrs. DeWinter in Hitchcock's Rebecca but lost the part to Joan Fontaine. In spite of such setbacks, Baxter quickly secured herself a silver screen debut in the Fox adventure comedy 20 Mule Team. By 1942, she was already billed as a star in such projects as The Pied Piper and Jean Renoir's American directorial debut Swamp Water. That same year, she delivered one of her most fantastic performances in Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons. Even though the studios famously mutilated the picture, the genius of the young performer's ingenious work is still perceptible.
Baxter's career from here on out is an odd mix of star roles and supporting parts. Unlike many of her colleagues, the actress never fully graduated to the status of perpetual leading lady. Her first Oscar nomination and sole win came in the supporting category (The Razor's Edge), but Baxter famously had to fight to campaign as lead for All About Eve. That might have cost her an easy win had she chosen a fraudulent route, though she was still nominated for Best Actress. During the 50s, Baxter became a freelancer, untethering herself from the exclusive studio contract and landed a variety of roles in projects as disparate as Hitchock's I Confess and DeMille's gargantuan camp epic The Ten Commandments. As she got older, opportunities waned in movies, and Baxter started working on TV, earning herself an Emmy nomination in 1969 for her performance in The Name of the Game. In 1983, Baxter even stepped in to substitute Bette Davis on the TV series Hotel when the older star became too ill to go ahead with the project. Anne Baxter died in 1985 after suffering a stroke, with her last episodes of Hotel broadcast posthumously.
Essential Viewing: The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), The Razor's Edge (1946), All About Eve (1950), The Blue Gardenia (1953), The Ten Commandments (1956).
LILLIAN GISH (1893-1993)
By far the most controversial figure in this list, Lillian Gish is a cinematic personality of incalculable historical importance. Her body of work extends for over seven decades, tracing the evolution of American film and acting styles, from the visceral pantomime of 1916's one-reelers to the pseudo-realism of 1980s melodramas. Furthermore, many of her silent performances can be counted among the most outstanding acting achievements ever captured on celluloid. She was a master at using her outward fragility to evoke a sense of internal chaos, controlled hysteria, transcendent suffering. While it was alongside D.W. Griffith that she learned her film craft and honed the skills that made her famous, I'd argue it was with director Victor Sjöström that she delivered her most complex screen performances. I have a soft spot for her mighty freak-out in Griffith's Broken Blossoms, but few actors were ever as devastating as Gish in Sjöström's The Scarlet Letter and The Wind.
There's a masterful stillness, a shot of bruising naturalism, to her work for the Swedish director that's mostly absent from her Griffith pictures, where a more frenetic demonstrativeness was preferred. Still, every one of her silent screen appearances is an unparalleled acting gem. Even her work in the vile Birth of a Nation, whose legacy Gish spent a lifetime defending, deserves some begrudging praise. It wasn't just the matter of the evil epic's exaggerated innovation that she proclaimed. Gish went as far as claiming that the film wasn't racist, re-writing history as she so often did in both her memoirs and interviews. Lillian Gish worked more than most to preserve interest in silent film throughout the 20th century, but she was awfully fond of warping the truth into a self-serving myth.
Gish's politics were anything but inconsistent too. Not only did she keep on defending the movie that rebirthed the KKK in the 1910s, but she spent a good part of the 30s on the side of American fascist movements, later lending her support to white nationalist causes way up until she died in 1993. You may decide to separate the art from the artist or not, but I won't deny that Gish was an amazing actress. Her transition to the talkies after the silent era ended illuminated another facet of her talents. Comedy was her Achilles heel – Gish said she was as funny as a barrel of dead babies, and she wasn't too far from the truth – but, even then, she found ways around these handicaps. Indeed, she kept working almost until her end, always finding ways to challenge herself and her craft whether working with great auteurs like Robert Altman or facing the new world of television. In summation, for better and for worse, Lillian Gish will forever have a place in the pages of film history.
Essential Viewing: Broken Blossoms (1919), The Scarlet Letter (1926), The Wind (1928), The Night of the Hunter (1955), The Whales of August (1987).
FLORA ROBSON (1902-1984)
It's a pity that most movie awards fans will primarily know Flora Robson for her Oscar-nominated Blackface stint in Saratoga Trunk. Her career extends far beyond this shameful misstep and, like most other actresses in the 1946 Best Supporting Actress lineup, she was a respected diva of the stage before ever stepping foot in front of a movie camera. Flora Robson started doing recitation for audiences from an early age and, by 1921, made her stage debut. That same year, she won a Bronze Medal from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. Unfortunately, the financial instability that comes with the acting profession forced Robson to split her time working as a factory welfare worker.
When the 30s arrived, those years of uncertainty were far behind her, with Robson having found success in the Cambridge Festival theater and the Old Vic. It was also at this time that the thespian made the transition from stage to screen. Her debut was as unglamorous as they come, an uncredited bit part in the 1931 crime drama A Gentleman of Paris. Her big breakout moment would come in 1934 when Alexander Korda cast her in The Rise of Catherine the Great as Empress Elisabeth. The royal grandeur of the role proved a perfect fit for Robson, and, just three years later, she once again played a famous royal to great success. This time, it was to be the iconic figure of Queen Elizabeth I in Fire Over England. Her take on the character, equal parts imperious and warmly severe, was such a smashing success that she returned to it in future projects, including the Hollywood swashbuckler The Sea Hawk.
Despite these forays into the American film industry, it was in Great Britain that Robson found her best roles, her most tremendous acclaim, and love. She even got a damehood in 1960. From Shakespearean tragedy to psychosexual thrillers, her range was remarkable even though most of her parts were relatively small. However, it should be noted that Saratoga Trunk didn't mark the only time Robson pretended to be other ethnicities on film. For instance, Nicholas Ray's 55 Days at Peking finds her doing yellowface for the role of Empress Dowager Cixi. Still, matters of racial insensitivity notwithstanding, Robson had a prosperous and remarkably long career. Her last movie was Desmond Davis' 1981 sword and sandal adventure Clash of the Titans, where she played a Stygian Witch. Dame Flora Robson died the following year from throat cancer.
Essential Viewing: The Rise of Catherine the Great (1934), Fire Over England (1937), Poison Pen (1939), Black Narcissus (1947), 7 Women (1966).
GALE SONDERGAARD (1899-1985)
As the first-ever winner of the Best Supporting Actress Oscar, Gale Sondergaard is a name that should be well-known to any awards-obsessive. Of course, the actor's cinematic legacy extends far beyond her Cheshire-grinning schemer in Anthony Adverse. Born to Danish immigrants, Sondergaard studied at the Minneapolis School of Dramatic Arts before finding work in the John Keller Shakespeare Company. Her theatrical pursuits took her on tour across the US before settling in New York, where she found a prosperous career that, eventually, won the attention of Hollywood filmmakers. Indeed, Sondergaard was a seasoned professional by the time she made her screen debut in the role that earned her the Oscar.
From then on, her career flourished, and she became a dependable character actress whose repertoire included an infinite array of snide, gossipy women with ill intentions towards some valiant protagonist. Occasionally, she got cast against type, as she was in The Life of Emile Zola and Sons of Liberty, but villains were her specialty. So iconic was her on-screen malignancy that she became one of the reported inspirations for the Evil Queen in Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and one of the top contenders for the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz. While most of her minor roles posed little challenge, Sondergaard often turned her typecasting fate into opportunities to savor deliciously mean lines. I'm especially fond of her take on a secondary feline antagonist in the 1940 Shirley Temple vehicle, The Blue Bird. Her performance as a transfigurated cat is the only reason to watch that particular flick.
Throughout her career in Hollywood, Gale Sondergaard was often cast in ethnic roles, donning on brownface and yellowface with frightful regularity. In 1946, she even nabbed a second Oscar nomination for one of these with Anne and the King of Siam. Her film career hit a significant roadblock around this time. Sondergaard supported her husband, director Herbert Biberman, during the HUAC hearings and was subsequently blacklisted as a communist sympathizer. During the 50s, she mostly stopped working but still helped produce Salt of the Earth, a seminal film about the fight for workers' rights in Latin communities. By the end of the 60s, the aged actor made a career comeback in all three actors mediums (stage, tv, and film). Her last film was the 1982 horror flick Echoes, also known as Living Nightmare.
Essential Viewing: Anthony Adverse (1936), The Life of Emile Zola (1937), The Letter (1940), The Mark of Zorro (1940), The Spider Woman (1943).
Don't forget to watch these actresses' nominated performances this week and send in your votes for the smackdown.