Russell, Rosalind (1908–1976)

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Russell, Rosalind (1908–1976)

American actress, famed for her performances in Auntie Mame and Gypsy. Born on June 4, 1908, in Waterbury, Connecticut; died of cancer on November 28, 1976, in Los Angeles, California; one of seven children of Clara Russell and James Russell (a trial lawyer); had a Catholic school education before graduating from New York's American Academy of Dramatic Arts in the mid-1920s; married Frederick Brisson (a producer); children: one son, Lance.

Won several parts on the stage before making film debut in Evelyn Prentice (1934); enjoyed great success in a string of comedies (1940s) in which she often played bright, witty career women; appeared in her most famous role as Auntie Mame both on Broadway (1956) and in the film adaptation (1958); nominated four times for an Oscar, was given a specially created award for the charity work which marked much of her later life (1972).

Films:

Evelyn Prentice (1934); The President Vanishes (1934); Forsaking All Others (1934); The Night Is Young (1935); West Point of the Air (1935); The Casino Murder Case (1935); Reckless (1935); China Seas (1935); Rendezvous (1935); It Had to Happen (1936); Under Two Flags (1936); Trouble for Two (1936); Craig's Wife (1936); Night Must Fall (1937); Live Love and Learn (1937); Man-Proof (1938); Four's a Crowd (1938); The Citadel (1938); Fast and Loose (1939); The Women (1939); His Girl Friday (1940); Hired Wife (1940); No Time for Comedy (1940); This Thing Called Love (1941); They Met in Bombay (1941); The Feminine Touch (1941); Design for Scandal (1941); Take a Letter Darling (1942); My Sister Eileen (1942); Flight for Freedom (1943); What a Woman (1943); Roughly Speaking (1945); She Wouldn't Say Yes (1945); Sister Kenny (1946); The Guilt of Janet Ames (1947); Mourning Becomes Electra (1947); The Velvet Touch (1948); Tell It to the Judge (1949); A Woman of Distinction (1950); Never Wave at a Wac (1953); The Girl Rush (1955); Picnic (1956); Auntie Mame (1958); A Majority of One (1962); Five Finger Exercise (1962); Gypsy (1962); The Trouble with Angels (1966); Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feeling So Sad (1967); Rosie (1967); Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows (1968); Mrs. Pollifax—Spy (1971).

No one could ever have accused Rosalind Russell of being timid. "It's important to make news," she once said, a statement she put diligently into practice during her 40 years on the stage and in movies. She played bright, brassy career women at a time when most American women were relegated to kitchens or charity bazaars; she sang the lead in musicals with a voice that even she compared to "a crow with a sore throat"; and she fearlessly took on roles ranging from nuns to murderers to the mother of a stripper. Her versatility so impressed theater critic Brooks Atkinson that he once suggested that she run for president. "She can dance and sing better than any president we have had," he observed. "She is also better looking and has a more infectious sense of humor."

Her energy and intensity might have been born from the competition that came from having three brothers and three sisters. Russell was the middle-born of the Irish-Catholic brood raised by James and Clara Russell in Waterbury, Connecticut. Her father had put himself through Yale Law School by playing semi-professional baseball and had gone on to become a successful trial lawyer by the time Rosalind was born on June 4, 1908. She had been named for, of all things, a steamship—the S.S. Rosalind, on which her parents had taken a cruise to Nova Scotia just before her birth. The energetic performances that marked her adult career were already much in evidence during her childhood as the roughneck of the family. Before she was 16, she had broken a leg jumping out of a hayloft and fractured a wrist in a leap off a wall, not to mention snapping a collarbone in a fall during a race and breaking an arm falling off a horse. Despite these adolescent catastrophes, she grew into a statuesque, 5'7" young woman much admired for her luxurious black hair, and successfully completed ten years of parochial school education, graduating in 1924.

Her schooling continued despite her father's early death in 1927, for James Russell left a comfortable estate and instructions that his children would receive no income from it until three years after completing their college education. Accordingly, Rosalind attended Marymount College in Tarrytown, New York, where she was drawn to the conviviality of the school's drama club and first took to the stage in several of its productions. Such was her attraction for the theater that she was allowed to leave Marymount in her sophomore year and transfer to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Manhattan, her mother being of the opinion that her daughter's addiction would quickly run the course. Besides, Rosalind promised that her interest in drama extended only to teaching it, certainly a respectable means for a young woman to make her way in the world. But before graduating from the Academy in 1929, Russell had appeared in several more student productions and had gotten herself noticed by two producers scouting talent for their summer theater upstate, in Lake Saranac. She was offered $150 a week for the coming season. Russell's devotion to the stage only intensified during the rigorous schedule of summer stock, in which she often played two different roles each week. "We rehearsed all morning, played golf all afternoon, and stayed up all night," she said fondly of those weeks under the summer stars. "We lived on youth, energy and no sleep. It was a wonderful summer."

After an autumn in Boston with a British repertory company, Russell made her Broadway debut early in 1930 in a revue called The Garrick Gaieties, staged by the Theater Guild, in which she sang and did sketches. After a tour with the show, she was back on Broadway in April 1931 for the comedy Company's Coming, although the show closed after only eight performances, and she took to the road again for the next three years with an assortment of stock companies. By 1934, Russell had learned to troupe with the best of them. She knew how to master a role quickly and instinctively, how to get a character across to the audience with a minimum of fuss and self-analysis, and how to take on a challenge with impeccable self-confidence. It all came in handy when a talent scout for Universal saw a performance in Newark, New Jersey, and offered her a screen test. She would test, Russell replied, only in Los Angeles; only if she were paid $100 for each test; and only if any forthcoming contract guaranteed her $300 a week. Universal fussed and complained, but Russell not only received $900 for her nine Hollywood tests but was offered a seven-year contract with a guarantee of, not $300, but $400 a week.

Further surprises were in store for her new employers. Upon learning that MGM might offer her a test for its upcoming production of the J.M. Barrie play What Every WomanKnows, Russell arranged a meeting with Universal head Carl Laemmle, Jr. She arrived wearing an unflattering dress, heavy, caked makeup, and a sorrowful expression. After hearing her complaints that she was unhappy in Hollywood and wanted to return to New York, Laemmle agreed to cancel her contract with no penalties. His reaction on learning a few days later that Russell had signed with MGM is not recorded. Although she was not offered a part in the Barrie film, Russell made her screen debut in 1934's Evelyn Prentice, a weepy melodrama starring Myrna Loy and William Powell, the studio's most popular screen couple.

Between 1934 and 1936, Russell made nine films for MGM and three more on loanout, usually playing the woman who loses her man to the leading lady. Since her characters were often fashionable, sophisticated society women, she referred to these early years in Hollywood as her "Lady Mary" period. A short-lived attempt at playing mantrapper roles followed, in films like China Seas and Reckless, with little success ("Rosalind Russell exhibits an excess of dental charm" was one of the kinder reviews); while a starring role in The Casino Murder was the result of the studio's decision to use her as a threat in its ongoing battle with Myrna Loy's demands for higher salaries. Russell was paired with Paul Lukas in the film as a second-string Nick and Nora Charles, and, while Loy might have gotten the message, The Casino Murder fizzled at the box office. A second attempt was more successful—1935's Rendezvous, in which the studio cast her opposite Powell, Loy's usual screen partner in the successful "Thin Man" series. Russell received her first screen success as the girl who enlists Powell to help uncover a Washington spy ring. "Miss Russell gets her first leading assignment … and ripens into full flower," enthused Variety, while Richard Watts in The New York Times thought that "Miss Russell is one of the most interesting and beautiful of the cinema's new lady sophisticates [and is] one of the film's greatest pleasures."

Despite the respectful reviews that greeted her next few pictures, MGM was reluctant to cast her in the part that became Russell's breakthrough role, as the deliciously malicious Sylvia Fowler in the studio's 1939 production of The Women, based on Clare Booth Luce 's scathing satire of New York society women. Rosalind's battle to win the role included five screen tests for director George Cukor, who flatly told her she wasn't right for it, and a personal appeal to Irving Thalberg, MGM's head of production. "Some of my best friends think I'm funny," she told him, in hindsight

an understatement from the woman who would in just a few years become the favorite comedian of millions of moviegoers. Russell threw herself into the role with her usual gusto, her onscreen fistfight with Paulette Goddard resulting in not a few actual cuts and bruises. Nor did she flinch off-screen in the face of a more formidable opponent, Norma Shearer , Thalberg's wife and the film's nominal star, when it was announced that Shearer's contract forbade any other woman from sharing top billing. Russell's answer was a three-day "sick leave," forcing the film to shut down until Shearer relented. The picture was a great success. " The Women brought me acceptance as a comedienne," Rosalind later said, and "also brought me my husband."

The husband in question was Danish-born theatrical agent Frederick Brisson, who had seen her in The Women during a transatlantic crossing. Brisson arrived in Hollywood as Russell was shooting His Girl Friday, in which she played the fast-talking, sharp-witted newspaper reporter Hildy Johnson. Brisson's friendship with the film's director, Howard Hawks, failed to produce a date; and while Rosalind's co-star, Cary Grant, sympathetically arranged a dinner date, it was nearly a year before Rosalind finally accepted Brisson. Grant served as best man at their wedding on October 25, 1941. Brisson became a well-known Hollywood agent during the next decade and earned the moniker "the Wizard of Ros" for his expert handling of his wife's career, including her decision not to renew her contract with MGM in 1942 and to work instead on a freelance basis. By then, she had appeared in four films in less than two years, all comedies, two of which, Hired Wife and No Time for Comedy, were released at the same time. "If Rosalind Russell doesn't capture all the votes for best screen comedienne this year," The New York Times observed in 1941, "it certainly won't be her fault."

With her "Lady Mary" phase now behind her, Russell became known for playing intelligent, business-minded women comfortably at ease among more perplexed male executives. There was, for example, the secretary in Hired Wife who agrees to marry her boss so his company can be transferred to her to avoid a lawsuit; the insurance company executive in This Thing Called Love whose statistical analysis of successful marriages induces her to delay consummating her own for three months to ensure its survival; and the judge in Design for Scandal who manages to save a trial lawyer from professional ruin. In her first picture after leaving MGM, 1942's Take a Letter, Darling, she had been promoted to the level of boss, playing an advertising executive with a male secretary and easily inhabiting a luxurious suite with a view of the Empire State Building and a huge desk peppered with telephones. "A woman in business faces many problems that men don't," she says in the picture. "Among those problems are men."

Acting is standing up naked and turning around very slowly.
—Rosalind Russell

But it was an uncharacteristic role that same year as a wide-eyed girl from Ohio that brought Russell her first Academy Award nomination. My Sister Eileen, based on a series of short stories by Ruth McKenney published in The New Yorker, observed the efforts of Rosalind's Ruth Sherwood and Janet Blair 's Eileen to make it big in New York after arriving in Greenwich Village from a small Midwest town. Russell would maintain a close association with the role, playing Ruth again in a broadcast version on Lux Radio Theater, and in a musical version called Wonderful Town on Broadway and on television. It was the first indication that Rosalind could handle roles outside of the social satires for which she had become known, although it didn't seem much of a change to her. "It's fine to have talent, but talent is the last of it," she said. "In an acting career, as in any acting performance, you've got to have vitality. The secret of successful acting is identical with a woman's beauty secret: joy in living."

With America's entry into World War II, Rosalind added bond rallies, fundraising appearances and charity work to her already full schedule, starring in two pictures during 1943 and, amazingly, giving birth to a son, Lance, in May of that year. Finally, she later told Time magazine, "I just got up one morning and fell in a heap." Her collapse was diagnosed as nervous exhaustion. Months of rest at home were ordered, and rumors began circulating that Russell would retire. "The collapse slowed me up long enough to realize that after a wonderful career, you either retire or go on to something you've never undertaken before," she said later. Typically, it was the latter course that she chose.

Roughly Speaking, the first film released after her collapse, was an attempt to combine her comedic talents with serious material—in this case, the true story of a wealthy woman who loses everything to a gigolo of a husband but triumphs in the end. Her next two choices were even more surprising. Sister Kenny was based on the story of Elizabeth Kenny , an Australian nurse who developed one of the first treatments for infantile paralysis. Although the film performed badly at the box office, critics were impressed with her dramatic abilities and Rosalind received her second Academy Award nomination. Then came 1947's Mourning Becomes Electra, in which she starred as the murderous Lavinia with Raymond Massey and Michael Redgrave in the film adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's tortured story of family hatreds and betrayals. The film was an even worse failure than Sister Kenny, and Rosalind later claimed she had done the picture only as a favor to the director, Dudley Nichols, with whom she had worked on several of her earlier movies. "I didn't particularly enjoy making the O'Neill film. It never fitted into the medium," she said. Audiences agreed. "When people stay away from it, as they are likely to do," critic Bosley Crowther accurately predicted, "it will not be because it is an 'adult picture,' but because it is just plain bad."

Smarting from such critical bruising, Russell returned to comedy roles in two films produced by her husband's film company and began to consider returning to the stage, from which she had been absent for ten years. She embarked with uncharacteristic caution on this new endeavor, touring during 1951 and 1952 in a production of John van Druten's Bell, Book and Candle to good reviews before taking on a full-blown Broadway role. "What makes you walk away is fear," she later wrote, "and you've got to conquer fear to live with yourself." Her triumphant return to Broadway in 1953's Wonderful Town, based on My Sister Eileen, completely obliterated whatever fears she might have had. The show, with a score by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, arrived at the Winter Garden in February after tryouts in Boston, New Haven, and Philadelphia. Russell hurt her back in New Haven when a chorus boy dropped her during a dance number; went on with the flu and a 103-degree temperature in Boston; and learned an entirely new opening number and a completely rewritten second act before the show premiered in Philadelphia. Her musical re-creation of Ruth Sherwood (with Edie Adams as Eileen) won her the New York Critics' Circle Award and a Tony during her 15 months with the show, during which she never missed a performance until leaving in 1954 because of a film commitment. The film was Joshua Logan's 1955 production of William Inge's Picnic, in which Russell turned in a touching performance as the lonely Rosemary, the spinster schoolteacher who is desperate to marry a man she's been dating for years. "I was very flattered that Josh Logan would see me as an old maid schoolteacher in Kansas," she once recalled. "I had been playing those Park Avenue dames for so many years."

While shooting Picnic, Russell received the galley proofs of a book written by Patrick Dennis, a memoir about growing up with a charmingly eccentric aunt. "You are my Auntie Mame for stage and screen," he said in the note attached to the proofs. Russell took the compliment to heart. She opened on Broadway in Auntie Mame in October 1956 to such rapturous reviews that the show, the most expensive produced

on Broadway that year, made its investors over a million dollars during its 17-month run. Russell successfully transferred the role to film in 1958 to earn her fourth Academy Award nomination. She announced a temporary retirement after the picture was completed, although she did not divulge that the reason for her absence was breast cancer. Nor did anyone but her family know of the two mastectomies she underwent, in 1960 and in 1965, before she was given a clean bill of health.

She was sufficiently recovered from the first operation to start work on a string of three pictures in 1961, all based on stage plays and all released in 1962. She played a Jewish mother who falls in love with a Japanese businessman in A Majority of One, a troubled housewife who falls in love with a younger man in the family drama Five Finger Exercise, and the aggressively ambitious Mama Rose in Gypsy. While the first two films did mediocre business and she was taken to task by the critics for her work in Five Finger Exercise, Gypsy captured the hearts of both audiences and reviewers. The film was based on stripper Gypsy Rose Lee 's memoirs of her early years in burlesque under her mother's tutelage, and adapted from the successful Broadway musical which had starred Ethel Merman as Mama Rose; Russell told reporters that she approached it not as a musical but as a great story with music. "People come to a musical to hear good music, but if I'm in it, they know they're going to hear damn little music. But they can hope for a good story," she said. That's exactly what audiences got. "Hold yer hats and hallelujah!," bubbled Time in its review of the film. "The old girl rips, roars, romps, rampages and rollicks through this raucous musical."

But Gypsy would prove to be Russell's last triumph, on stage or screen. Her film work during the late 1960s was more interesting for its variety than for its quality. She played a Mother Superior at a girls' school in Disney's 1966 The Trouble with Angels and in the 1968 sequel; an eccentric widow in Arthur Kopit's black comedy Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feeling So Sad; and a madcap millionaire mother committed to an asylum by her greedy daughters in Rosie. In 1969, she was felled by rheumatoid arthritis and again had to stop working. The side effects from the steroids used to treat the disease were troublesome, and she later regretted her public announcement of her condition, claiming it made the studios nervous about hiring her. "Loss of health is the worst thing that can happen to anybody," she said. The disease had become so crippling by the early 1970s that she was able to work in only one film, 1971's Mrs. Pollifax—Spy, produced by her husband with a screenplay she had adapted herself from Dorothy Gilmore 's novel. She used the pseudonym C.A. McKnight, her mother's maiden name, just as she had 15 years earlier for a film called The Unguarded Moment, written for Esther Williams in 1956. Mrs. Pollifax was her last screen appearance.

She turned to fundraising activities for charities and appearances for the National Council of the Arts with such vigor that, in 1972, she was awarded the American Academy's Jean Hersholt Award for Humanitarian Service, and attended a sold-out "Tribute to Rosalind Russell" at New York's Town Hall in 1974. Asked during the proceedings what she considered her greatest achievement, Russell promptly retorted "Being alive." The response was more than quick-witted repartee. Although her struggles with arthritis had long been public knowledge and Russell openly discussed her condition in her autobiography, only her family knew that her cancer had returned. "One disease to a book is enough," she told her husband. Weakened by a broken hip that required surgery early in 1976, she died peacefully at home on November 28.

Her husband saw to it that the autobiography she had been writing during the last two years of her life was published posthumously, in 1977. Russell had drawn its title from her most famous role. "Life's a banquet," Auntie Mame tells her adoring nephew, "and most poor suckers are starving." In shaping and guiding her own career, Rosalind Russell had seen to it that her plate was always full, and her guests always well fed.