Word: gordon
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Heading it are Katharine Cornell, Ju dith Anderson, Ruth Gordon. Flanking them, moreover - in mere character parts - are Edmund Gwenn, who last season swaggered through the gaudy title role of The Wookey; Alexander Knox, who last season minced through the prissy title role of Jason; Dennis King, who made girlish hearts beat faster as the hero of Show Boat, Rose Marie, The Vagabond King...
Distractingly Gordon. Breathless,darting Actress Gordon at her best is brilliant. Though she made her debut as Nibs in Peter Pan, no play could represent her, as actress or woman, worse. She found her roles as the gutsy young wife in Saturday's Children, the gaunt and twisted Mattie Silver in Ethan Frame, the restless, rebellious Nora of A Doll's House, the prancing, hoydenish Mrs. Pinchwife of the lewd Restoration comedy, The Country Wife. Tense, biting, almost distractingly alive, Actress Gordon would make her presence felt at the height of a hurricane...
...actress does not belie the woman. Ruth Gordon has a sharp tongue in her head, no coy sweetness, no fake modesty. Told she stands on the theater's top rung, she retorts: "It's about time." Told that The Three Sisters will be a model for aspiring actresses, she snaps: "It should be." Asked to compare her acting with Cornell's and Anderson's, she counters: "Do you say that Renoir is two inches behind Manet, or Degas a foot ahead?" She snarls at Nature: "I don't care if a flower grows upside down...
Once married to the late Actor Gregory Kelly, once rumored married to Producer Jed Harris, Actress Gordon fortnight ago married Private Garson Kanin, wiry, 30-year-old former boy wonder among Hollywood directors...
...Lavinia Mannon in O'Neill's, Mourning Becomes Electro, the Queen in the Gielgud Hamlet, the Mother of Jesus in Family Portrait, Lady Macbeth to the Macbeth of Maurice Evans. Quiet, practical, an actress without frills, she has less glow than Actress Cornell, less glitter than Actress Gordon, greater range and resourcefulness than either. Of her Critic Percy Hammond once remarked that, unlike other actresses, she could be "reticently excited." And she is painstaking. For the great sleepwalking scene in Macbeth she persuaded Johns Hopkins doctors to hypnotize a patient, and then copied the results...