Mary Astor

Mary Astor (born Lucile Vasconcellos Langhanke; May 3, 1906 – September 25, 1987) was an American actress. Although her career spanned several decades, she may be best remembered for her performance as Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon (1941).

Astor began her long motion picture career when a teenager in the silent movies of the early 1920s. When talkies arrived, her voice was initially considered too masculine and she was off the screen for a year. After she appeared in a play with her friend Florence Eldridge, film offers returned, and she resumed her career in sound pictures.

In 1936, Astor's career was nearly destroyed by scandal. She had an affair with the playwright George S. Kaufman and was branded an adulterous wife by her former husband during a custody fight over their daughter. Overcoming these stumbling blocks in her private life, she went on to greater film success, eventually winning an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of the concert pianist Sandra Kovak in The Great Lie (1941).

Astor was a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer contract player through most of the 1940s and continued to work in film, television and on stage until her retirement in 1964. She authored five novels. Her autobiography was a bestseller, as was her later book, A Life on Film, which was about her career.

The director Lindsay Anderson wrote of Astor in 1990 that when "two or three who love the cinema are gathered together, the name of Mary Astor always comes up, and everybody agrees that she was an actress of special attraction, whose qualities of depth and reality always seemed to illuminate the parts she played."

Life and career

Astor was born in Quincy, Illinois, the only child of Otto Ludwig Wilhelm Langhanke and Helen Marie de Vasconcellos. They married on August 3, 1904, in Lyons, Kansas.

Astor's father taught German at Quincy High School until the U.S. entered World War I. Later on, he took up light farming. Astor's mother, who had always wanted to be an actress, taught drama and elocution. Astor was home-schooled in academics and was taught to play the piano by her father, who insisted she practice daily. Her piano talents came in handy when she played piano in her films The Great Lie and Meet Me in St. Louis.

In 1919, Astor sent a photograph of herself to a beauty contest in Motion Picture Magazine, becoming a semifinalist. When Astor was 15, the family moved to Chicago, Illinois,

She made her debut at age 14 an exponent of Francesco Lamperti, but no roles were offered. Her acting career was then given a boost by her friend, Florence Eldridge, (wife of Fredric March), in whom she confided. Eldridge, who was to star in the stage play Among the Married at the Majestic Theatre in Downtown Los Angeles, recommended Astor for the second female lead. The play was a success, and her voice was deemed suitable, being described as low and vibrant. She was happy to work again, but her happiness soon ended. On January 2, 1930, while filming sequences for the Fox movie Such Men Are Dangerous, Kenneth Hawks was killed in a mid-air plane crash over the Pacific. Astor had just finished a matinee performance at the Majestic when Florence Eldridge gave her the news. She was rushed from the theatre to Eldridge's apartment. A replacement, Doris Lloyd, stepped in for the next show. Astor remained with Eldridge at her apartment for some time, then soon returned to work.

Shortly after her husband's death, she debuted in her first talkie, Ladies Love Brutes (1930) at Paramount, in which she co-starred with her friend Fredric March. While her career picked up, her private life remained difficult. After working on several more movies, she suffered delayed shock over her husband's death and had a nervous breakdown. During the months of her illness, she was attended to by Dr. Franklyn Thorpe, whom she married on June 29, 1931. That year, she starred as Nancy Gibson in Smart Woman, playing a woman determined to retrieve her husband from a gold-digging flirtation.

In May 1932, the Thorpes purchased a yacht and sailed to Hawaii. Astor was expecting a baby in August, but gave birth in June in Honolulu. The child, a daughter, was named Marylyn Hauoli Thorpe: her first name combined her parents' names, and her middle name is Hawaiian (Hau'oli is a Hawaiian word that means joyful, happy, full of delight). When they returned to Southern California, Astor freelanced and gained the pivotal role of Barbara Willis in MGM's Red Dust (1932) with Clark Gable and Jean Harlow. In late 1932, Astor signed a featured player contract with Warner Bros. Meanwhile, besides spending lavishly, her parents invested in the stock market, which often turned out unprofitable. While they remained in Moorcrest, Astor dubbed it a "white elephant," and she refused to maintain the house. She had to turn to the Motion Picture Relief Fund in 1933 to pay her bills. She appeared as the female lead, Hilda Lake, niece of the murder victims, in The Kennel Murder Case (1933), co-starring with William Powell as detective Philo Vance. Film critic William K. Everson pronounced it a "masterpiece" in the August 1984 issue of Films in Review.

Soon unhappy with her marriage, due to Thorpe having a short temper and a habit of listing her faults, by 1933 Astor wanted a divorce. At a friend's suggestion, she took a break from movie-making in 1933 and visited New York alone. While there, enjoying a whirlwind social life, she met the playwright George S. Kaufman, who was in a strong, but open marriage. She documented their affair in her diary. Thorpe, by now making use of his wife's income, discovered Astor's diary, and told Astor that her liaisons with other men, including Kaufman, would be used in any divorce proceeding to support the charge that she was an unfit mother.

Custody case

thumb|260px|right|Astor with her daughter, Marylyn Thorpe, and her son, Anthony del Campo (1944)

Thorpe divorced Astor in April 1935. Astor's diary was never formally offered as evidence during the trial, but Thorpe and his lawyers constantly referred to it, and its notoriety grew. Astor admitted that the diary existed and that she had documented her affair with Kaufman, but maintained that many of the parts that had been referred to were forgeries, following the theft of the diary from her desk. The diary was deemed inadmissible as a mutilated document because Thorpe had removed pages referring to himself and had fabricated content. The trial judge, Goodwin J. Knight, ordered it sealed and impounded. Florabel Muir, then with the New York Daily News, is known to have invented fabricated diary passages in her articles. After Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), the studio allowed her to debut on Broadway in Many Happy Returns (1945). The play was a failure, but Astor received good reviews. On loan-out to 20th Century Fox, she played a wealthy widow in Claudia and David (1946). She was also loaned to Paramount to play Fritzi Haller in Desert Fury (1947), the tough owner of a saloon and casino in a small mining town.

Before Helen Langhanke died of a heart ailment in January 1947, Astor said she sat in the hospital room with her mother, who was delirious and did not know her, and she listened quietly as her mother told her all about terrible, selfish Lucile, referring to Astor by her birth name. After her death, Astor said she spent countless hours copying her mother's diary so she could read it and was surprised to learn how much she was hated.

At MGM, Astor continued being cast in undistinguished, colorless mother roles. One exception was when she played a prostitute in the film noir Act of Violence (1948). The last straw came when she was cast as Marmee March in Little Women (1949). Astor found no redemption in playing what she considered another humdrum mother and grew despondent. She later described her disappointment with her cast members and the shoot in her memoir A Life on Film:

The studio wanted to renew her contract, promising better roles, but she declined the offer.

Middle years

right|thumb|[[Fiesta (1947 film)|Fiesta (1947)]]

At the same time, Astor's drinking was growing troublesome. She admitted to alcoholism as far back as the 1930s, but it had never interfered with her work schedule or performance. She hit bottom in 1949 and went into a sanitarium for alcoholics.

In 1951, she made a frantic call to her priest and said that she had taken too many sleeping pills. She was taken to a hospital and the police reported that she had attempted suicide, this being her third overdose in two years. The story made headline news. She maintained it had been an accident.

That same year, she joined Alcoholics Anonymous and converted to Roman Catholicism. She credited her recovery to a priest, Peter Ciklic, also a practicing psychologist, who encouraged her to write about her experiences as part of therapy. She also separated from her fourth husband, Thomas Wheelock (a stockbroker she married on Christmas Day 1945), but did not actually divorce him until 1955.

In 1952, she was cast in the leading role of the play The Time of the Cuckoo, which was later made into the movie Summertime (1955), and subsequently toured with it. After the tour, Astor lived in New York for four years and worked in the theater and on television.

Her TV debut was in The Missing Years (1954) for Kraft Television Theatre. She acted frequently in TV during the ensuing years and appeared on many big shows of the time, including The United States Steel Hour, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Rawhide, Dr. Kildare, Burke's Law, and Ben Casey. In 1954, she appeared in the episode "Fearful Hour" of the Gary Merrill NBC series Justice in the role of a desperately poor and aging film star who attempts suicide to avoid exposure as a thief. She also played an ex-film star on the Boris Karloff-hosted Thriller in an episode titled "Rose's Last Summer."

Astor starred on Broadway again in The Starcross Story (1954), another failure, and returned to southern California in 1956. She then went on a successful theatre tour of Don Juan in Hell directed by Agnes Moorehead and co-starring Ricardo Montalbán.

Astor's memoir, My Story: An Autobiography, was published in 1959, becoming a sensation in its day and a bestseller. It was the result of Father Ciklic urging her to write. Though she spoke of her troubled personal life, her parents, her marriages, the scandals, her battle with alcoholism, and other areas of her life, she did not mention the movie industry or her career in detail. In 1967, a second book was published, A Life on Film, where she discussed her career. It, too, became a bestseller. Astor also tried her hand at fiction, writing the novels The Incredible Charley Carewe (1960), The Image of Kate (1962), which was published in 1964 in a German translation as Jahre und Tage, The O'Conners (1964), Goodbye, Darling, be Happy (1965), and A Place Called Saturday (1968).

Astor appeared in several movies during this time, including Stranger in My Arms (1959). She made a comeback in Return to Peyton Place (1961) playing Roberta Carter, the domineering mother who insists the "shocking" novel written by Allison Mackenzie should be banned from the school library, and received good reviews for her performance. According to film scholar Gavin Lambert, Astor invented memorable bits of business in her last scene of that film, where Roberta's vindictive motives are exposed.

Final years and death

thumb|upright|Astor's grave at Holy Cross Cemetery

After a trip around the world in 1964, Astor was lured away from her Malibu, California home, where she was gardening and working on her third novel, to make what she decided would be her final film. She was offered the small role as a key figure, Jewel Mayhew, in the murder mystery Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), starring her friend Bette Davis. She filmed her final scene with Cecil Kellaway at Oak Alley Plantation in southern Louisiana. In A Life on Film, she described her character as "a little old lady, waiting to die." Astor decided it would serve as her swan song in the movie business. After 109 movies in a career spanning 45 years, she turned in her Screen Actors Guild card and retired.

Astor later moved to Fountain Valley, California, where she lived near her son, Anthony del Campo (from her third marriage to Mexican film editor Manuel del Campo), and his family, until 1971. That same year, suffering from a chronic heart condition, she moved to a small cottage on the grounds of the Motion Picture & Television Country House, the industry's retirement facility in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, where she had a private table when she chose to eat in the resident dining room.

Astor died on September 25, 1987, at age 81, of respiratory failure due to pulmonary emphysema while in the hospital at the Motion Picture House complex. She is interred in Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California.

Filmography

Radio appearances

{| class="wikitable"

! Year !! Program !! Episode/source

|1939

|The Campbell Playhouse

|"The Hurricane"

| 1941|| Gulf Screen Guild Theatre || No Time for Comedy

| 1944|| Inner Sanctum Mystery || "The Melody of Death" (April 22)

In popular culture

Edward Sorel wrote and drew the graphic novel Mary Astor's Purple Diary: The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936, about Mary Astor.

Bibliography

Works

My Story: An Autobiography (1959)
The Incredible Charlie Carewe (1963)
The O'Conners (1964)
Goodbye Darling, Be Happy (1965)
The Image of Kate (1966)
A Life on Film (1967)
A Place Called Saturday (1968)

Sources

Kathleen Spaltro The Great Lie: The Creation of Mary Astor (2021)

References

External links

Papers

Mary Astor scrapbook, Brigham Young University, Harold B. Lee Library, L. Tom Perry Special Collections

::"clippings ... from various newspapers in the United States"

Texts

Imogene S. Smith. (February 2010) A Lady's a Lady: The Versatile Elegance of Mary Astor Bright Lights Film Journal
"You Don't Wanna Know About How Frank She Was": A Conversation with Marylyn Hauoli Thorpe Roh, daughter of Mary Astor by SelfStyledSiren.blogspot.com (July 6, 2010)

Websites by Joseph Egan, author of The Purple Diaries

The Mary Astor Collection
Mary Astors golden ten - The Purple Diaries

Media

Mary Astor Photographs and literature at virtual-history.com
Mary Astor photo gallery at silent-movies.org

Metadata

Mary Astor - KinoTV Movie Database by Unicorn Media