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Birth name: Gladys Georgianna Greene
Born: October 17, 1900, Plattsburgh, New York
Died: June 19, 1991, age 90 Carmel-by-the-Sea, California
Career:
Arthur debuted in the silent film Cameo Kirby (1923), and made a few silent westerns and short comedies (all low-budget), although it was her distinctive nasal voice -- in addition to some much needed stage training -- that eventually made her a star in the talkies. She was selected as one of the WAMPAS Baby Stars in 1929. In 1935 -- at age 34 -- she starred opposite Edward G. Robinson in the gangster farce The Whole Town's Talking, and her popularity began to rise.
It was her role opposite Gary Cooper in 1936 in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town that made her a star. She continued her fame by starring classics such as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington in 1939, 1942's The Talk of the Town, and again in 1943 in The More the Merrier, for which she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress. Arthur remained Columbia's top star until the the mid-1940s, when she left the studio and Rita Hayworth took over as the studio's reigning queen.
She also was considered for the role of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind.
Retirement:
Never particularly happy being famous or a film star, Arthur retired when her contract with Columbia Pictures expired in 1944.
She turned down virtually all film offers, the two exceptions being Billy Wilder's A Foreign Affair (1948) and the Western classic Shane (1953), which turned out to be the biggest box-office hit of her film career. In the years between these films, Arthur scored a major triumph on Broadway starring in a stage revival of Peter Pan playing the Eternal Boy when she was almost fifty.
In 1968, she was coaxed back to Broadway to appear as a midwestern spinster who falls in with a group of hippies in the play The Freaking Out of Stephanie Blake. William Goldman, in his book The Season reconstructed the disastrous production, which eventually closed during previews when Arthur refused to go on -- partly because of her well-known stage fright and partly because the play was shaping up to be a fiasco.
She had missed out on another triumph a few years before when she was cast in the lead of the play Born Yesterday but her nerves and insecurity got the better of her and she left the production before it reached Broadway, opening the door for Judy Holliday to take the part.
After retiring, she taught drama at Vassar College. She also returned to acting, albeit briefly, in a short-lived comedy, The Jean Arthur Show on CBS in the 1966-67 season.
Personal Life & Death:
Photographer Julian Anker in 1928, annulled after one day.
Producer Frank Ross Jr. from 1932-49, divorced
She died from heart failure in 1991 and had her ashes scattered at sea near Carmel-by-the-Sea, California. She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6331 Hollywood Blvd. The Jean Arthur Atrium was her gift to the Monterey Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California.
QUOTES:
"It's a strenuous job every day of your life to live up to the way you look on the screen."
"I guess I became an actress because I didn't want to be myself."
"I am not an adult, that's my explanation of myself. Except when I am working on a set, I have all the inhibitions and shyness of the bashful, backward child...Unless I have something very much in common with a person, I am lost. I am swallowed up in my own silence."
"The fact that I did not marry George Bernard Shaw is the only real disappointment I've had."
[On Hollywood] "I hated the place - not the work, but the lack of privacy, those terrible prying fan magazine writers and all the surrounding exploitation."
"If people don't like your work, all the still pictures in the world can't help you and nothing written about you, even oceans of it, will make you popular."
(on doing interviews) "Quite frankly, I'd rather have my throat slit."
"I bumped into every kind of disappointment, and was frustrated at every turn. Roles promised me were given to other players, pictures that offered me a chance were shelved, no one was particularly interested in me, and I had not developed a strength of personality to make anyone believe I had special talents. I wanted so desperately to succeed that I drove myself relentlessly, taking no time off for pleasures, or for friendships - yet aiming at the stars, I was still floundering."
"First I played ingenues and Western heroines; then I played Western heroines and ingenues. That diet of roles became as monotonous as a diet of spinach. The studio wouldn't trust me with any other kind of role, because I had no experience in any other kind. And I didn't see how I was ever going to acquire any other experience if I couldn't get any other kind of role. It was a vicious circle."
"It's hardly fair for women to do the same things at the same hours every day of their lives, while men have new experiences, meet new people every day. I felt that way as a little girl, with two older brothers around the house. It seemed to me that they led adventurous lives, compared with mine. I felt cheated and frustrated. I became a tomboy in self-defense. I decided that I was going to do things that were exciting, or at least interesting."
[speaking in in the 1930s] "I've never had a single close intimate girl friend in all my life. I never had a chum to whom I could confide my secrets. I suppose that accounts for the fact that now it is so painfully difficult for me to open my heart and confide in people who are, so often, almost strangers. You have to learn so very young to open your heart."
[on her early acting days] "My very 'naturalness' was my undoing. I had to learn that to appear natural on the screen requires a vast amount of training, that is the test of an actors art. It would be more spectacular if I could say that out of the hurt and humiliation of that failure was born a determination to success, to prove I had the makings of an actress. But it wouldn't be true. That urge came later."