TERESA WRIGHT (October 27, 1918 - March 6, 2005)
was interviewed by famed publicist John Springer at the Players on January 25, 1998 about her life and career on stage and screen.

Her first Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress nomination occurred in 1941 for her debut work in
The Little Foxes.  She did win an Oscar for her performance as the daughter in Mrs. Miniver co-starring with Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon.

Top film directors, including William Wyler and
Alfred Hitchcock admired her thorough preparation and quiet professionalism.  (source: Wikipedia)





THE INTERVIEW  (transcribed by Mari Lyn Henry)

JS:       Did you always want to be an actress?

TW:     Yes I did. As a very small child, I acted through high school, voted best actress in school, that sort of thing, came to New York after graduation.  Two months later I got a job understudying
Dorothy McGuire in Our Town out on the road and played it.  My first job in New York was in
Life With Father in 1939.
            I celebrated my 21st birthday in the theatre, in the beautiful Empire Theatre.
Russel Crouse walked down the aisle with a birthday cake singing Happy Birthday to You. It doesn't get much better than that.

JS:      Who was smart enough to get you out to Hollywood? Was it Sam Goldwyn?

TW:   I think it was.  I was told that Lillian Hellman saw me in Life With Father and suggested me
to Willy Wyler and to Goldwyn.  Oscar Serlin made my test.  (During Life With Father I had been asked to do a screen test for a role in a film I really wasn't right for. They put a lot of makeup on me and told me which way to turn.  It was awful!  So Oscar suggested if I was ever asked to do another one he would be glad to do it.)   Thank God he (who had made a lot of tests in his life) heard about it and said when it is really important for you to be in something, let me make the test. So when
Goldwyn wanted to see some film on me he just brought me into a studio without any makeup and just talked to me and that was my screen test for The Little Foxes, my first film.

JS:     For her very first film she got her very first Academy Award nomination.

TW:  I was so lucky. It was a great film to start with.  Willy Wyler directed. Bette Davis,
Herbert Marshall, such a wonderful cast!   Then I was asked to come back to New York and do a
play by Ferenc Molnar and fortunately I was asked to return to Hollywood and do the role in
Mrs. Miniver.  Then the day after I finished that I went into Pride of the Yankees.
         An unusual beginning; it didn't last very long but it was great while it lasted.

JS:   You may be the only performer who was nominated for Best Performance by an Actress and Best Performance by a Supporting Actress in the same year.  Mrs. Miniver and as far as I am concerned you should have won for Pride of the Yankees.  There were other pictures for which you should have been nominated--The Best Years of Our Lives and Shadow of a Doubt.

TW:   Those are my two favorite films. One of my favorite roles was not in a film, but in a movie for television.  The American Movie Classic, Ring Lardner Jr.'s  Golden Honeymoon with
James Whitmore.  It was a charming story.

Teresa Wright in Mrs. Miniver

JS:  Let me throw out some names of people you have been associated with.  Anything you can say or want to say about them.
Alfred Hitchock (Shadow of A Doubt)

TW:  He was a delight to work with when I was working with him. The film was one of the first on location, instead of on a studio set. This was in 1942.  His whole family was with him, Pat (his daughter) and Alma (his wife). It was like being with a family. Joe Cotten and his wife were there.  Hitchock was great fun.  It was more like being in a play than being in a film.


JS: You mentioned Bette Davis. She was kind of intimidating for a girl in her first move, wasn't she?

TW:  I was scared before I met her. It was overwhelming. The day I met her I was on the Goldwyn lot and I went into what was the Goldwyn dining room, a little bungalow, and I was talking to some friends and my back was to the door and she came in. I guess I heard her voice and I just had chills down my back.  I was introduced to her, but once I got on the set it was just like being with any other actor in a play, on stage, in rehearsal and she was wonderful!  All the stories about being difficult--the old mill really grinds them up you know. Not any truth in it at all.

JS:   Gary Cooper.

TW:  He was just dear. I didn't feel that I knew him well because for the most part he kept to himself. He used to whittle, sitting there whittling airplanes, and when we weren't working he'd be outside flying them.

JS:  Frederic March.

TW:  I adored Freddy. He was also a good friend. He and his wife Florence (Eldridge) lived near
Bob (Robert Anderson) and I in Bridgewater, CT. We saw a great deal of them.  He was marvelous and very much the spirit of The Best Years of Our Lives.  

JS:  How about Joseph Cotten?

TW:  Joe was very funny. When we were making Shadow of a Doubt we were on location in Santa Rosa, close to the Chinese community in San Francisco. One evening we were treated to a very ancient Chinese feast and Joe kept commenting about all the strange exotic dishes (like hundred year old eggs) and he was hilarious.

JS:   Bob Mitchum.

TW:  Bob was one of the most unusual people I ever worked with. He had a bad boy reputation. For some reason he liked to appear as not caring, not knowing his lines.  He would come in and say what is the scene, what are we doing today, and so forth. Then he would go on and he would know it word perfect. It is a strange kind of psychological thing to let people think you don't care and then be absolutely marvelous on screen.  If you really looked at his face there was always something going on in his eyes and you got it.  That's what pictures really are.

JS:   Marlon Brando who did his first film with you.

TW:  A little bit like Mitchum in that he would like to kid around off stage. He would tell the tallest tales and behave like a twelve year old but on stage he was completely---I mean none of us could touch him in The Men. He was so marvelous and so that person and the rest of us were acting.
On set in those days Marlon was not only good but he didn't want to do anything that was wrong or would rock the boat in any way.  He wanted to learn all about films.
         There was a scene that was very tense and long where the camera had to come in and out, and the technicians would move the carpet as the camera came. When you have done films, you learn not to think about crew members moving around. Between takes, he would ask what they were doing. So I told him that they had to move the carpet for the camera to move in easily. But if it bothered him they were able to do it ten different ways and all you have to do is request that.  He said no. So I went to director Fred Zinnemann and told him about Marlon's question and my response. Fred asked them to do it differently.  That is how much Marlon did not want to rock the boat.  I felt Marlon became disillusioned as an actor, perhaps frightened to go back to the stage. When I think of what he did in
The Godfather, he really is a great, great actor and that shouldn't be forgotten.

JS:   Dame May Whitty. (During filming of Mrs. Miniver)

TW:  Richard Ney (Greer Garson's son in Mrs. Miniver and husband in real life) was just not one of my favorite people. He was difficult to act with. He affected a British accent in his speech throughout the filming.  One day he and Dame May Whitty had a scene together in a swing. It had to be done over and over.  Finally she said, (British and grand) "Dear boy, would you please speak up? I cannot understand you."  And he said, "All right I'll do it your way but I prefer it my way." And she said,
"Your way? You don't have a way!"  Everyone broke up.

JS:  Director Francis Ford Coppola and The Rainmaker? (adaptation of John Grisham's book)
She played role of Miss Birdie in 1997.

TW: I was in the film two weeks. We had a week's rehearsal which I haven't done since the days of William Wyler and Hitchcock.  It makes such a difference when you get to rehearse, really work on something and we had a week's rehearsal in Napa Valley. From there we went to Memphis where we had a week's rehearsal. When we were on the set, I remember the first scene I did. Francis said, "Well we are going to rehearse this on film to get us into it." And that was the take. He likes to do that because we had already rehearsed.

JS:  During the war when we first saw you in Mrs. Miniver, I was with a group of guys who had a crush on you. The other guys had a crush on Betty Grable and Jane Russell. For a long time after I got married my wife could not quite understand that--until today.

Before the interview there was a screening of The Actress starring Ms. Wright, Jean Simmons and Spencer Tracy.  Anthony Perkins made his screen debut in this film.  It was directed by George Cukor and was based on the play Years Ago by Ruth Gordon.  John Springer asked her: "In the business atmosphere of the 1950s, what was your agent's reaction to your leaping from ingenue roles to the mother's role in The Actress?  She didn't remember she had as much screen time as she did.  "It probably couldn't have been better cast. It was lovely working with Jean and Spencer and George. I wasn't old enough for the role, just ten years older than Jean, and today it would be cast better."
Before the beginning of the screening, she had received a telegram from Ruth Gordon which said, "I never thought I'd see the day when you would be playing my mother!"

LEST WE FORGET
HAPPY 116TH BIRTHDAY
HELEN HAYES
(October 10, 1900 - October 10, 2016)
FIRST LADY OF THE AMERICAN THEATRE

In 1972, Helen Hayes and her best friend
Anita Loos collaborated on a book about their 'trip back down' odyssey of rediscovering the fabulous New York city that they so loved.
What emerged was Twice Over Lightly: New York Then and Now.

When Ms. Hayes was asked at a luncheon in her honor, "What do you think we're doing on Broadway that's wrong?

Her reflections on the past, present and future of Broadway were shared with the honesty, passion and love of the theatre that she embraced for over seven decades.

IN HER OWN WORDS
       Well, I think we've become too earnest. We've forgotten that the main function of a player is to play.  I wish we'd all relax and put on some gay, glamorous shows with actors wearing beautiful romantic clothes.
        I think Broadway started to slip when we began to take ourselves seriously as Artists, and spelled it out in capital letters.  We strained for what we called 'artistic integrity.' The trouble was that too many of us mistook pretensions for integrity.  We've been sold on the idea that truth has got to be ugly, depressing, vulgar. In recent years we've tried so hard to strip the theatre of beauty that we've stripped some actors of their costumes.  Let's see what can be done to put clothes back on actors.
       Well, I'd like to see our commercial theatre relieved of its phony pretensions to Art. In all the years I've been in the theatre, I can count the number of great artists I've encountered on the fingers of one hand.   But I've worked with plenty of real pros like me. We adored our jobs, developed and used what talents we had to the limit of our capabilities.  If we fell short of greatness we weren't undone by that so long as audiences liked and appreciated us.
       That was the time when we only hoped to please the public who paid to see us. But now they are the last thing we ever think about.  We only aim to please ourselves and to impress other actors or the critics, whom we pretend to despise.
      Time was when there was a love affair between the theatre and the public, and because love creates a magical illusion we loved ones behind the footlights---those dear, kind footlights!--walked in beauty.  People came to the theatre to see us enacting lives of vivid color, in elegant speech and in gorgeous clothes---all in an aura of Du Barry Pink light.  It was not Art; it was not Truth. But it sure was comforting.  I'd love to see a matinee idol again, suave, impeccably tailored, breaking hearts with a light touch. Or an improbably chic Ina Claire changing Chanel creations eight times a performance and never being caught with her wit down.
      Yes, I'd like to see the commercial theatre relieved of the burden of 'Art' and free to caper.
Let's revive our love affair with the public.  If people really care, they'll find their way back to us. If only we can start people caring again, Broadway will come back."

LEST WE FORGET
HAPPY 116TH BIRTHDAY
HELEN HAYES
(October 10, 1900 - October 10, 2016)
FIRST LADY OF THE AMERICAN THEATRE

In 1972, Helen Hayes and her best friend
Anita Loos collaborated on a book about their 'trip back down' odyssey of rediscovering the fabulous New York city that they so loved.
What emerged was Twice Over Lightly: New York Then and Now.

When Ms. Hayes was asked at a luncheon in her honor, "What do you think we're doing on Broadway that's wrong?

Her reflections on the past, present and future of Broadway were shared with the honesty, passion and love of the theatre that she embraced for over seven decades.

IN HER OWN WORDS
       Well, I think we've become too earnest. We've forgotten that the main function of a player is to play.  I wish we'd all relax and put on some gay, glamorous shows with actors wearing beautiful romantic clothes.
        I think Broadway started to slip when we began to take ourselves seriously as Artists, and spelled it out in capital letters.  We strained for what we called 'artistic integrity.' The trouble was that too many of us mistook pretensions for integrity.  We've been sold on the idea that truth has got to be ugly, depressing, vulgar. In recent years we've tried so hard to strip the theatre of beauty that we've stripped some actors of their costumes.  Let's see what can be done to put clothes back on actors.
       Well, I'd like to see our commercial theatre relieved of its phony pretensions to Art. In all the years I've been in the theatre, I can count the number of great artists I've encountered on the fingers of one hand.   But I've worked with plenty of real pros like me. We adored our jobs, developed and used what talents we had to the limit of our capabilities.  If we fell short of greatness we weren't undone by that so long as audiences liked and appreciated us.
       That was the time when we only hoped to please the public who paid to see us. But now they are the last thing we ever think about.  We only aim to please ourselves and to impress other actors or the critics, whom we pretend to despise.
      Time was when there was a love affair between the theatre and the public, and because love creates a magical illusion we loved ones behind the footlights---those dear, kind footlights!--walked in beauty.  People came to the theatre to see us enacting lives of vivid color, in elegant speech and in gorgeous clothes---all in an aura of Du Barry Pink light.  It was not Art; it was not Truth. But it sure was comforting.  I'd love to see a matinee idol again, suave, impeccably tailored, breaking hearts with a light touch. Or an improbably chic Ina Claire changing Chanel creations eight times a performance and never being caught with her wit down.
      Yes, I'd like to see the commercial theatre relieved of the burden of 'Art' and free to caper.
Let's revive our love affair with the public.  If people really care, they'll find their way back to us. If only we can start people caring again, Broadway will come back."

LEST WE FORGET GENEVIEVE WARD
(March 27, 1837 - August 18, 1922)

She was appointed Honorary Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire on her 84th birthday in 1921.

"She is the greatest actress I have ever seen, and quite the most artistically faultless."
           Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Born in New York City to Colonel Samuel Ward and his wife Lucy, she was the granddaughter of former mayor Gideon Lee. When she was three years old, she accompanied her parents to Europe. (Imagine being a toddler on a ship in 1840!)   While there she became interested in the visual arts and music, and became proficient on the piano.

At the age of 19 she married a Russian count, Constantine de Guerbel. When the family returned to New York, she met Henriette Sontag who encouraged her to study singing in Italy and Paris.  Her debut appearance under the stage name
Ginevra Guerrabella occurred at Bergamo in the opera Stella di Napoli (1855).  Following appearances were in Lucrezia Borgia (Milan, 1856); Don Giovanni (Paris, 1859); Robin Hood (London, 1861) and her final role in La Traviata (New York, 1862).
          Loss of her voice due to an illness obliged her to leave the operatic stage and for some years she taught singing in New York.

A DRAMATIC CAREER

Queen Margaret in Richard lll

She returned to England in 1873 and began a long successful dramatic career.  Roles include: Lady Macbeth at Theatre Royal, Manchester; The Hunchback with Charles Wyndham; Rebecca in Ivanhoe (1875). Her most popular success was as Stephanie de Mohrivart in H. C. Merivale's and
F.C. Grove's Forget Me Not which she produced at the Lyceum Theatre (1879). She toured with it over 2,000 times all over the world.
       In her later years she portrayed character roles in Shakespeare's Coriolanus as Volumnia and Margaret of Anjou in Richard lll at the Old Vic theatre in London.

What follows are her published thoughts on the essentials and qualifications of a good actor.
I think for the actors who read this blog that you will find them insightful and inspirational.


IN HER OWN WORDS
             "In my opinion the physical attributes of an actor or actress should be a good figure, an expressive face, clear, sonorous, penetrative voice, articulation distinct and unhesitating, and a graceful bearing.  Mentally he or she should be endowed with a keen perception of character, artistic tastes, and above all, the dramatic instinct.
              By dramatic instinct I mean that natural quality which enables one almost intuitively to simulate the effects produced by the various emotions and passions of the human creature, and to understand the workings of these emotions.  This inborn power of controlling the means employed for the simulation of these emotions is the sine qua non in every actor, or in any one who would seek "by action and utterance and the power of speech to move men's hearts." The method to be used in mastering these means will vary with the individual student. The only certain formula I can name is work and observation.
           In addition to natural gifts, all who have reached eminence on the stage of the past or the present have had this capacity for constant and untiring industry. 'There are no gains without pains.'
          With regard to emotion and whether an actress should "feel" her part, I cannot do better than recall the remarks I contributed some years ago to Mr. Archer's symposium on 'The Psychology of Acting'.  Tears come to my eyes in a moving situation, but seldom run over. Sometimes they are unbidden, and sometimes I work on them.  I have been obliged when studying a part (Constance in King John for instance) to stop tears and sobs and would not have attempted to play it until I could control my feelings.    ....I have not found it made any difference with my audience whether I actually shed tears or not (very few see the real tears).  They feel the pathos of the situation and do a good part of the acting themselves.
         Many sad experiences in my life have helped to intensify my feelings on the stage. I have seen a young actress, whose pathos rarely touched her audience, perform one night under the influence of the deepest sorrow, tears rolling down her cheeks freely, and sobs breaking her voice. Yet the audience was quite as unmoved as on other occasions in the same situation.  To my mind this proves that personal emotion, unaccompanied by the power of dramatic expression, is not sufficient to move an audience."

RESOURCES

Sue Young Histories.  Blog: Genevieve-ward-1837-1922

Genevieve Ward.  Both Sides of the Curtain
A volume of her reminiscences.  1918

Wikipedia

MISS ELLEN TERRY was born at Coventry on February 27, 1848. She made her first appearance at the Old Princess's Theatre, then under the spirited management of Charles Kean, playing Mamillius in A Winter's Tale.  She has told us how her heart swelled with pride when she learned what demands the part made upon her histrionic powers.

     "A small go-cart, which it was my duty to drag about the stage, was also a keen sense of pride, and a great trouble to me. My first dramatic failure dates from that go-cart.  I was told to run about with it on the stage, and while carrying out my instructions with more vigor than discretion, tripped over the handle, and down I came on my back.
                                                      A titter ran through the house and I felt my career as an actress was                                                       ruined forever!"
            She later played Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream, which had a run
of two hundred and fifty nights at the Princess's.
                  "I revelled in the impish unreason of the sprite and even now feel the charm of parts where the imagination can have free play, and there is no occasion to observe too closely the cold, hard rules of conventionality and fetters of dry-as-dust realism."

ELLEN TERRY IN HER OWN WORDS
Early training with Mr. Byrn

"Perhaps a word or two with reference to the dear old days when I too was a beginner on the stage may best illustrate my thoughts on the actor's apprenticeship.  It was at the old Princess's that I was grounded in the essentials of an actress's education.  Well do I remember the lessons in 'deportment' which I received at the hands of dear old Mr. Byrn, the prinicpal tenet of whose dramatic faith was that -----"an actress was no actress unless she had learned to dance early."
          He would have had walking and posturing reduced to an exact science. An old-fashioned minuet step--to which he attached special importance--and, "walking the plank," which was to walk first slowly, then quicker, then at a considerable pace, along one of the planks extending the whole length of the stage, without deviating an inch from the straight line, were among his methods of giving an actress ease and grace in her actions.  Although we children used to laugh at Mr. Byrn's military orders, I for one have since learned to appreciate the value, not only to deportment, but to a clear utterance, which lies in observing the order 'a chest thrown out, and a head thrown back.'

ARTICULATION LESSONS
           In the most essential detail of articulation I learned from Mrs. Kean even at this early period of my apprenticeship; for although that gifted actress mainly directed her instructions to the grown up ladies of the company, I was always a willing pupil at her little lectures.
     "A, E, I, O, U my dear 'she used to say,' are five distinct vowels, so don't mix them all up together as if you were making a pudding. If you want to say, 'I am going to the river,' say it plainly and don't tell us you are going to the 'rivah'!  You must say her, not har; it is God not Gud; remonstrance, not remunstrance, and so on."  As to gesture she would say, 'Use your arm from the shoulder; not from the elbow. Get your action free; don't stand like a trussed fowl"

ADVICE TO THE ACTOR IN HER OWN WORDS

The value of such teaching when the mind is young and impressionable cannot well be overestimated. It has always seemed to me, however, that the best school of acting is the theatre, where students may go and witness good acting for themselves, with their eyes and ears open to the varying shades of expression, the propriety of actions, and interpretation of character.

I consider it is a very important thing that actors should, at an early stage of their careers, come under the influence of the immortal Shakespeare. The Shakespearean drama is the most wholesome of all food for the actor. During my juvenile days at the Princess's, that theatre was almost entirely given up to Shakespeare, and although I was very young then, I am conscious that, even, as early as that, association with the Shakespearean drama was most beneficial to me, and the lessons I learned almost unconsciously at the Princess's have, I am persuaded, been of no little use to me in my career.
                                        One thing which the young actress must always bear in mind is, that no stage effects should be left to chance.  Everything should be rehearsed and foreseen. No greater mistake is made than to suppose that because certain effects on the stage may seem to be spontaneous they are due to the 'inspiration of the moment.' The true artist always calculates to a nicety what he or she will do at certain crucial points in the progress of the play, and it is when the action thus prearranged is carried out with the appearance of spontaneity that the art is true.  Seemingly accidental effects may thus be, and in a great artist always are, the result of much study and elaborate rehearsal.  The beginner may regard the advice, "Always act at rehearsal." as one of the axioms of acting.
                                        Another important thing is to have a reason for every action on the stage. Every movement, every look of the eye should tell to some purpose; there should be no meaningless gesticulation.  Repose is at once the most necessary and the most difficult thing to cultivate; but by perseverance the art of appearing at perfect ease under the critical gaze of an audience can be mastered.

RESOURCE:  Hammerton, J. A.  The Actor's Art: Theatrical Reminiscences and Methods of Study and Advice to Aspirants specially contributed by Leading actors of the Day. Preparatory note by Henry Irving.  London.  George Redway. 1897