Our Daily Dead

The Independant
Few actresses have had such a meteoric start to their Hollywood careers as the fetchingly unpretentious Teresa Wright. She won Oscar nominations for her first three films, a record still unequalled, and five of her first six movies, including The Little Foxes, Shadow of a Doubt and The Best Years of Our Lives, are acknowledged classics.

However, she was to find herself both the beneficiary and the victim of the studio and contract system of the time. When the producer Sam Goldwyn signed her to a contract, she insisted on a famous clause stipulating that she would not have to “pose for photographers in a bathing suit”. She also avoided fan-magazine interviews and vetoed studio-concocted romances. She was given roles in prestigious productions guided by top directors, but her dislike of publicity, and time off for pregnancies, alienated Goldwyn, who terminated her contract, after which her screen image lost some of its lustre. Her later career was primarily on television and in the theatre, where she continued to win acclaim for her truthful and compassionate performances.

Born Muriel Teresa Wright in 1918 in New York City, she was the only child of an insurance agent and his wife, who separated soon after her birth. She was then raised by family in New York and New Jersey, and did not attend school until she was eight years old. After going on a trip to New York to see Helen Hayes in Victoria Regina, she took an interest in acting and played leading roles in school plays. A teacher helped her get a scholarship to the Wharf Theater in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she was an apprentice for two summers.

After graduating from Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey, in 1938, she moved to New York, adopting the name Teresa Wright as there was already a Muriel Wright registered with Equity. In the autumn of 1938 she was given work on Broadway playing a small role and understudying Dorothy McGuire (who had succeeded Martha Scott) in the role of Emily in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. She did not get a chance to play Emily in New York, but played the part on tour in New England in the spring of 1939.

A spell in summer stock preceded her creating the role of Mary, the ingénue in Life with Father (1939), the comedy by Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse which holds the record as the longest-running straight play in American theatre history. Wright had been playing in the show for almost a year when Sam Goldwyn went to see it. He later recalled that, when he went to see her backstage,

Miss Wright was seated at her dressing table, and looked for all the world like a little girl experimenting with her mother’s cosmetics. I had discovered in her from the first sight, you might say, an unaffected genuineness and appeal.

He offered her a contract the same night, and immediately cast her as Alexandra, the daughter of the ruthless, grasping Regina Giddens, in the screen version of Lillian Hellman’s study of greed in the South The Little Foxes (1941). The final confrontation between mother and daughter, when Alexandra rejects Regina’s offer of conciliation and accuses her of murdering her father, displayed Wright’s ability to reveal the moral strength latent in her character’s ingenuousness.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 1st, 2005 at 12:00 am and is filed under ODD Guests. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

NY Times
Teresa Wright, the high-minded ingénue who marshaled intelligence and spunk to avoid being typecast as another 1940’s “sweater girl” and became the only actor to be nominated for Academy Awards for her first three films, died on Sunday at Yale-New Haven Hospital. She was 86.

The cause was a heart attack, her daughter, Mary-Kelly Busch, said.

Miss Wright had many parts on Broadway and once performed at a White House dinner for President Franklin D. Roosevelt, but her meteoric landing in Hollywood in 1941 is the stuff of legend.

After seeing her on Broadway, Samuel Goldwyn, the legendary producer, asked her to play the role of Bette Davis’s daughter in “The Little Foxes” in 1941. Her performance in the film moved its director, William Wyler, to tell The New York Times that she was the most promising young actress he had ever directed.

She proved his point by being nominated for an Academy Award for best supporting actress for the picture. The next year, she was nominated for best actress for her next role, opposite Gary Cooper as Lou Gehrig’s wife in “The Pride of the Yankees,” and won the Oscar for best supporting actress as the love interest of Greer Garson’s war-bound son in “Mrs. Miniver.”

Her work included a starring role in Wyler’s “Best Years of Our Lives,” winner of the best-picture Oscar in 1946; playing opposite Marlon Brando in his first movie, “The Men,” in 1950; and creating the character of Charlie, the innocent but suspicious niece of a serial killer, in Alfred Hitchcock’s harrowing “Shadow of a Doubt” in 1943.
Teresa Wright memorabilia at eBay.com

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 8th, 2005 at 12:00 am and is filed under ODD Guests. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.