Word: actresses
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...eleven weeks of shooting, the atmosphere on the huge sound stage often became intensely uncomfortable. "Juniper Hill State Hospital" grew as real to the actors' eyes as to the camera's lens. At one point, an elderly extra, abstractedly scratching her stomach, turned to one of the actresses and said: "Hey, didja ever see so many characters in one place?" As the actress recalls it: "Suddenly it struck me-my God, maybe I am crazy. What's the norm? How can you tell?" When the superintendent of nurses at a California institution visited the set, she looked...
...reality, she might very likely suffer a relapse). But with all its minor faults, The Snake Pit is an important motion picture. One of its notable achievements is that it establishes Olivia de Havilland not so much as a star, a dubious title she already held, but as an actress...
...Actress. The De Havilland performance is happily free of the traditional weeping and gnashing of teeth which most actors seem to relish in "mad" parts. Her Virginia is not thrashing about in darkness, but is blinded and bewildered by too much light. What gives her bewilderment a special quality is the firm, almost prim, dignity which she sustains even in the animal moments of Virginia's madness. She is excellent in the little scenes of rebellion-carefully preserved from the novel-with which Virginia tries to shake off her fate. And she can speak lines of questionable worth with...
Although painfully shy, nine-year-old Olivia was already an actress. In a school Hansel and Gretel, she played the mother, the head angel and the second witch-and bitterly resented not being cast as Gretel. But Stepfather Fontaine disapproved of the stage. In her junior year in high school, when he forbade her to play Violet in Mrs. Bumpstead-Leigh, Olivia left home. Although she later made her peace with her stepfather, she "never slept under that roof again...
With a will as hard as the heart of a front-office executive, Olivia prepared to fight Hollywood for a place as an actress. To build up a reserve, she saved money, chiefly by cutting down on clothes. When Warner tried to put her back into the slush-mines after lending her out to play Melanie in Gone With the Wind, she rebelled and was suspended for a total of six months. Her seven-year contract at last expired (in 1943) and Warner tried to make her serve the extra six months she had "lost." Against the advice of everyone...