Word: greer
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...what cinemaddicts saw in Goodbye, Mr. Chips and Greer Garson, was something old and cherished in their hearts, but new and unexpected on the screen-the Ideal (if overidealized) Woman. Not a full-bosomed, cottontailed babe, a chromium goddess, an uncrowned martyr or a vampire bat, but a woman who simply looked and acted the way any grownup, good woman should. Miss Garson's beauty was neither parasitic nor predatory, but rich and kind. She wore the sort of ample, archaic dresses in which many cinemaddicts tenderly remembered themselves, their wives, or their mothers. She did not make love...
With Madame Curie, the new cinematic element embodied by Miss Garson is finally isolated. The Ideal Woman is at last presented in simple cinemapotheosis. Greer Garson is Her greatest, indeed Her exclusive, Prophet...
...Bluestocking. A somewhat precocious child was mother to this Ideal Woman. Little Miss Garson was high-strung, bronchitic, given to fainting spells, and ill at ease with her nasty little peers (who called her Ginger). At an age when the average young Neanderthaler is spelling out "I HATE BOOKS," Greer was already too old for Alice in Wonderland. She sprinkled her porridge with table talk from succés d'estime like Colley Gibber and His Circle. "I was," she recalls, "rather a stuffy child...
...University of London, which she swooped through in three years (on scholarships and with honors), Greer played in amateur theatricals. Her college yearbook thumbnailed her as "a unique blend of La Belle Dame Sans Merci and Goldilocks and the Three Bears." This unique blend returned from a year's study at Grenoble with a passionate desire to become an actress. Cried her Presbyterian grandmother: "No granddaughter of mine will ever lift her legs upon a stage." So Greer set up and operated a market research library for a London advertising firm, soon rated a respectable ?10 a week...
...wangled a letter to the business manager of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. Miss Garson strong-armed him into starting her at ?4 a week instead of ?3. For two years she played leads. After that, Greer did walk-ons and held garlands in highly respectable and futureless productions of Shakespeare in Regent's Park Open Air Theatre. She was about to leave the theater a suicide note and go back to Commerce. But one night, while Greer was in the bleak gentility of The University Women's Club, high-glazed, handsome Authoress Sylvia Thompson (The Hounds of Spring...