Designer Double-Dip: Something Borrowed

Okay - right away - I don't want you to get your hopes up that I've somehow discovered that Scarlett O'Hara's wedding gown from Gone with the Wind (1939) was featured in a later movie. As far as I'm aware, that's not the case. I just came upon a bit of costuming info that I thought might be fun to share. 

In the movie, Scarlett (Vivien Leigh) hastily agrees to wed a young man about to head off to fight for the South in The Civil War. The wedding dress designed by Walter Plunkett was deliberately intended to look different from the other clothing in the movie, as if it were her mother's (the divine Barbara O'Neil) dress from a couple of decades earlier, quickly put to use for the occasion. (In the first picture, you can see that it is a tad too long and that O'Neil is several inches taller than her on-screen daughter.)

When Alfred Hitchcock, who was under contract to Wind producer David O. Selznick at the time, prepared screen tests for his upcoming drama Rebecca (1940), he utilized this wedding gown to see how hopeful Joan Fontaine might look in the period gown she wears for a costume party in the film.

You'll note that while both Leigh and Fontaine were 5' 3-1/2", Fontaine did not possess quite the same wasp waist that Leigh did. For the screen test, the huge sleeves of the dress were pushed down a bit to show a wisp more shoulders and decolletage than when it was used for a wedding ceremony.

The costume pilfering didn't stop there, though. Most of us also recall the scarlet evening gown that Leigh wears to Ashley Wilkes birthday party the evening after she's been accused of trying to seduce him at her lumber mill.

Her husband Rhett (Clark Gable) makes her wear the most seductive and potentially scandalous gown she owns as penance (and even deposits her at the door of the party, leaving immediately himself without even entering so that she can face the music all on her own!)

Likewise, this dress was placed on (the virtually unknown) Fontaine's back for the Rebecca tests to see how she would look in a more form-fitting creation. Again, the shoulders are both pushed down rather than with one slightly up as Leigh wore it in the first film.

(There's an almost Madame X - the John Singer Sargent painting - quality to this look on Fontaine.)

This one is more flattering on Fontaine than the wedding dress, though, even taking into account the difference black & while photography makes, it has precious little of the impact that it had when Leigh wore it.

These legendary movie costumes are fortunately still in existence today and are occasionally displayed in exhibits. Their construction, under the ever-watchful eye of producer Selznick, was clearly second-to-none as they are now nearly eighty years old and still hold much of their original shape and lustre.

Both of them have been immortalized in Hallmark Christmas ornaments as well:

Here we see the Rebecca costumes (uncredited, but reportedly designed by Irene) which Fontaine wound up with in the end. The black gown with flowers was intended to look inappropriate on the naive second Mrs. de Winter. The costume party formal is, of course, based upon the portrait of the prior Mrs. de Winter, the Rebecca of the title.

What makes all of this interesting (to me, at least!) is that Fontaine tested for the part of the second Mrs. de Winter in the costumes of Vivien Leigh, who sought the part for herself! Not only that, but her husband Laurence Olivier was to be the male lead, Maxim de Winter, and he wanted her there, too. Leigh wanted the part tremendously and even tested for it as well. It was likely felt than anyone who had just convincingly played the gutsy Scarlett would have a hard time selling audiences that she was a timid mouse. If anything, Leigh brings to mind the sensual, manipulative Rebecca de Winter and it's possible that her own spectre really did hang over the production.

Oh, What a Character! Part Four: Flying the Cooper

Nowadays with seemingly every actress under the sun striving to stay as young-looking as (in)humanly possible, it makes one wonder who's going to play the old ladies (or if stories will even include old ladies in them!) I recently read some remarks from one actress (whose name, sadly, escapes me) who said she wasn't going to have any surgery on her face because “someone has to look the right age for older parts.” She's a rarity in any case. What a shame that we put so much emphasis on looking young that we encourage people to pull and hack on their faces, resulting in not really youth, but a sort of uneasy state of semi-mobile plasticity in many cases.

Today's featured character actress is known for her rich portrayals of craggy, wrinkled, commandeering monsters – with the occasional kindhearted characterization thrown in for variety. She made little-to-no effort to preserve her looks even though, as a young lady (and some folks may be surprised to find this out), she was hailed across two continents as the most beautiful woman in England! Miss Gladys Cooper, infamous as a soul-crippling mother from hell, was the subject of countless portraits in which she either modeled benignly or enacted classic theatrical roles, becoming something of a pin-up. But first we go back to the beginning.

Gladys Cooper was born as such on December 18th, 1888 in London, England to a journalist father. She was one of the offspring from her father's second marriage to a somewhat younger woman. She had elder half-brothers and sisters from his first marriage along with two “full” sisters, one of whom was born deaf. A striking child from the start, she was being used as a model in the rapidly burgeoning postcard industry by the age of six, often being paired with musical comedy actress Marie Studholme, as seen here. Later, when she embarked on a stage career at the tender age of seventeen, she was singled out for her looks rather than for her acting ability, though she soon undertook training in singing, dancing and movement, which served to broaden her skills.

In 1908, now almost twenty, she eloped with Herbert John Buckmaster (known as “Buck”) much to her parents' displeasure (her father practically shunned her for a year over it.) While still performing in the theatre, she had become a prolific photographer's model and continued to appear on thousands of postcards. The style of the day was not to smile, but to look thoughtful, serene or even mildly forlorn. (This was also due to the need to remain perfectly still for a period while the film was exposed.) Some of Cooper's expressions are positively haunting in their immediacy, such as the one above left with her long hair cascading and her surprisingly tough expression. By July of 1910, she'd given birth to her daughter Joan (who would later marry actor Robert Morley.) The pretty child would become a popular model as well, both with and without her mother.

During WWI, British soldiers received more postcards with her visage on them than any other, making her a sort of “pre-Betty Grable” of The Great War. When her son John came along in 1915, he, too, became a model and his cherubic face and wave of blonde hair graced many a postcard as well. (Sadly, John would experience mental and anger problems as a young adult and would eventually have to be institutionalized.) Cooper entered the British silent film industry, making several appearances in addition to her continued work in the theatre. Her husband unable to fully contend with the fact that his wife was bringing home 9000 pounds per year from her artistic ventures and following their separation for a time due to the war, the couple's marriage faltered and they were divorced in 1920.

Among her stage successes in England were The Misleading Lady, The Naughty Wife, Home and Beauty, The Sign on the Door and even a stint as Peter Pan! When the leader of a playhouse with which she'd become associated fell ill, she began managing the place while simultaneously originating the role of Leslie Crosbie in Somerset Maugham's The Letter. The production cost 4,000 pounds, but ultimately made 40,000!

In 1928, she married Sir Neville Pearson, which lent her the title of Lady Pearson. The couple had a child (her third) named Sally, born in 1930. Cooper was forty-two and had successfully bucked the existent social system by producing her own plays and running a business followed by having another baby while over the age of forty. By 1934, she had come to Canada to work in The Shining Hour with Raymond Massey. The Shining Hour was a Broadway success as well, but it was forced to close due to being promised at a London theatre by a certain date.

Her marriage now on the rocks due to lack of common interests along with separation due to her career, she eventually found love with another actor, Phillip Merivale, whose wife was dying. She initiated divorce proceedings and moved with her daughter to New York City to find work in the theatre. In 1935, she made her very first talking picture, The Iron Duke, playing the villainous daughter of Louis XVIII against the legendary actor George Arliss, who portrayed The Duke of Wellington. In 1937, she married Merivale and was step-mother to his four children. By now, Joan was twenty-five and John was twenty and they had remained in England to pursue their own lives and careers.

Cooper and her husband made several attempts at performing together, including Broadway productions of Othello and Macbeth, but they were unsuccessful and financially devastating. In time, they returned to England to tour in plays. Things finally looked up when Cooper was befriended by the authoress Daphne du Maurier, who alerted her to the filming of her novel, which was going to be made in Hollywood by Alfred Hitchcock, in his American film debut. The movie Rebecca had a small, but appealing, role in it for Cooper and it would introduce her to a whole new level of acting recognition.

Rebecca, in which she played Laurence Olivier's pragmatic but friendly sister, was a major success, winning the 1940 Oscar for Best Picture and winning over legions of fans of the source novel. Cooper found that she utterly adored sunny California, even if she had trouble navigating the streets of Los Angeles and Hollywood. When war broke out in 1939, Cooper was torn between staying in The States or returning home. She decided to stay and explore her newfound success as a cinema character actress while sending food and money back home, which the luxurious salaries she was being paid allowed her to do.

In Kitty Foyle, she played the disapproving mother of the man Ginger Rogers loved and became pregnant by. She then played Laurence Olivier's wife in That Hamilton Woman, a film in which he carried on an affair with (his by then wife in real life) Vivien Leigh. She also wound up in the decidedly lesser-rung films, The Black Cat and The Gay Falcon (one of a series of films starring George Sanders.)

One of her all-time most remembered parts came in 1942, though. In Now, Voyager, she was the acidic, controlling, iron-hearted mother of Bette Davis, a late-in-life child who serves her mother at the expense of her own personality and development. Then when Davis undergoes a stunning makeover, both physically and emotionally, Cooper can scarcely stand it and promptly begins a decline, at least part of which is engineered to further rein in her daughter. This mercilessly intimidating and demanding characterization earned Cooper an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress and lives on as one of her best concoctions. The statuette went to Teresa Wright for Mrs. Miniver, however.

Gay men tend to love Now, Voyager in part because Davis' “coming out” as a swan and breaking free from the shackles of an oppressive, disapproving parent often mirrors the type of agonies that can happen when a man realizes he is different and fears that he won't be able to live within the confines his family has, on purpose or not, dictated. Plus, we just love to see a good makeover! Interestingly, Davis had just had a success playing the same role on screen that Cooper had originated in The Letter, but there was no hostility between the actresses. In fact, Davis quite revered Cooper.

This triumph was followed up with The Song of Bernadette, which had Jennifer Jones as a young girl who sees visions of The Virgin Mary, but who is not believed by others, especially Sister Therese, a stern, devout and sometimes venomous nun. I don't have to tell you who got that role, but it netted her another Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actress. This time Katina Paxinou took home the award for her role in For Whom the Bell Tolls.

In 1945, she played Gregory Peck's mother in The Valley of Decision, a film that had Greer Garson as a household servant falling for Peck, who was outside her social class to say the least. This time out, Cooper was kindly and caring, offering sympathy to the troubled young lady whose heart was crumbling. (She had worked with Garson the previous year in Mrs. Parkington as well.) She also played a caring character in The Green Years, a film that detailed the life of a young Scottish orphan who is raised by his elders. Though fifty-seven in real life, she was aged in the film to her late eighties. The young man was played by Tom Drake (of Meet Me in St. Louis fame), but in the earliest scenes, he was portrayed by Dean Stockwell. Based on this photo, Stockwell is probably the only person alive today who can honestly say that he had been to bed with Gladys Cooper! Ha! This is a notable film for fans of married actors Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, too, because not only was she pregnant during the filming with his child, but she played his daughter in the the movie despite being two years older than him in real life!

She had an unusual role in 1946's Beware of Pity as the blind wife of Cedric Hardwicke. The film's star, Lilli Palmer, played a woman rendered paraplegic after a horseback riding accident. Cooper's scenes chiefly consisted of her trying to convince Palmer's suitor that he can live with her handicap, though it may be too late for them to make it work. It was a solid acting exercise for a woman who was always in danger of being typecast as a meanie.
After her third husband died of heart trouble in 1946, Cooper never remarried again and began working in both England and the U.S. as opportunities dictated. She played the mother of Lana Turner and Donna Reed in the sweeping epic Green Dolphin Street, her character's deathbed scene a highlight, and was an exacting philanthropist with an agenda in The Bishop's Wife, with Cary Grant, David Niven and Loretta Young. (At one point, Niven even snarkily implies that she could be the dragon in a proposed stained glass window!) She then appeared in The Pirate with Judy Garland and Gene Kelly and in Madame Bovary, again with Jennifer Jones, where she played still another disapproving mother. Then there was the commandeering Mrs. Medlock in The Secret Garden, in which she terrorized Shirley Temple. In 1952's At Sword's Point, she portrayed an aging Queen Anne, who summons the children of the famous musketeers for help. One of the children was female Maureen O'Hara, who swashbuckled right along with the men! She went to Broadway in 1955 to play in The Chalk Garden and was nominated for a Tony, then she went back to California to work in the film Separate Tables. In Tables, she made life hell for her employee Deborah Kerr. (Ironically, Kerr would later star in the movie of The Chalk Garden, though not in Cooper's role. That went to Edith Evans.)
Cooper returned to Broadway in 1962 when she appeared in A Passage to India, which netted her another Tony nomination. She also worked on television, memorably starring in a few episodes of The Twilight Zone. One of those paired her with an up and coming young actor by the name of Robert Redford! She played a petrified woman afraid to leave her home who takes in a young injured man who may very well be death (just one more tidbit people can use when comparing Brad Pitt and Redford since Pitt later played Death in Meet Joe Black.)One more Oscar nomination was around the corner, this time for her work as Rex Harrison's mother, Mrs. Higgins, in the lavish musical My Fair Lady. No longer a dragon lady, such as in the bulk of the screen roles that made her famous, she was kindly and knowing, rooting for Harrison to take Audrey Hepburn as his bride. She had played the same role in a Hallmark Hall of Fame TV production of Pygmalion just the year before. Like others in the cast, she was dressed in Cecil Beaton's carefully conceived costumes. If you look carefully at a portrait over the fireplace in Harrison's character's home, you will see that it is actually a painting of Cooper done in 1922. Ironically, she was pitted against Edith Evans for The Chalk Garden, a role that Cooper had originated, but the Oscar went to Lila Kedrova for Zorba the Greek, in any case. Miss Cooper would never be granted The Academy Award. (Incidentally, Evans once described the young Cooper's beauty as unphotographable, as if a camera couldn't really ever capture it, but added that it was “enough to stop a bus” when witnessed firsthand as she often used to watch Cooper from the wings, transifixed by her face under the stage lights.)

Next, Cooper took part in a television series called The Rogues, which starred David Niven (who, along with fellow Rogues costar Robert Coote, had been on a cricket team that Cooper sponsored during WWII), Gig Young and Charles Boyer. The black and white show focused on these con artists and gave her a chance to play a regular role on a continuing program for once, as part of their schemes. She was nominated for an Emmy award for her solid acting on the show.

Still working rather steadily, 1967 brought The Happiest Millionaire, an overlong, bloated musical by Walt Disney that starred Fred MacMurray, an unbearable Tommy Steele and Cooper's old costar from The Valley of Decision, Greer Garson, in her own last feature film role. Soon after this, Cooper was made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire for her work in contributing to the art of acting. Apart from taking joy in grandmotherhood, she continued to work in the theatre all along, including reviving The Chalk Garden, and made another film (for which she secured third billing) in 1969, A Nice Girl Like Me. Unfortunately, Miss Cooper was stricken with lung cancer and though she continued to work even while battling the disease, it finally (along with a case of pneumonia) claimed her on November 16th, 1971, at the age of eighty-two.

Gladys Cooper was not a tall or large woman, but she was capable of incredible impact as an actress, able to come across as intimidating in the extreme if need be. She felt no need to explore the mechanics or the inner processes of her craft, able to turn on and off at will, and could frequently be found playing poker in between scenes of even the most challenging stage roles. As good as she was, she considered her profession a job that needed to be done in order to survive comfortably. Her own assessment of the first glimpse of herself in Rebecca, which was really the true start of her film career, was this: “a strange hunchbacked creature in an ill-fitting tweed suit out of whose mouth such a frightful grating noise comes that I thought something must have gone wrong with the soundtrack.” We're often our own harshest critic. In The Underworld, we give thanks that she didn't decide to abandon screen acting because, through it, she has given us so many hours of pleasure!

There is Nothin' Like a Dame

One of the screen’s all-time imposing personas is our featured actress today, Dame Judith Anderson. Miss Anderson was born Frances Anderson in South Australia in 1897. Already treading the boards as a professional actress (using the name Francee Anderson) at the age of 17, she worked with other performers of differing national backgrounds. Julius Knight, a Scotsman, was an actor who had a profound impact on her approach to the craft. Some American players she worked with saw enough potential in her to encourage her to try for a career in the United States.

At about twenty years of age, she flew to California, attempting a career there, but was not met with success. Shortly thereafter she tried New York City and, again, found nothing. A very dry period of ill health and a dangerously low amount of ready cash nearly led to her early destruction. However, she finally landed work with a stock company in 1918. She began working with other similar companies, frequently on tour, before making her Broadway debut in 1922 in a show called On the Stairs (billed now as Frances Anderson.) She seems to have a bit of a Norma Shearer thing going here.

Changing her name to Judith Anderson, she enjoyed a rousing success on Broadway with Louis Calhern in Cobra. She was fortunate to be able to tour Australia with that play and two others in 1927. By the time the 30s rolled around, she was an established stage actress with a tremendous reputation. She worked steadily and played roles that would later be reenacted by other ladies when the shows were adapted for the cinema screen, such as As You Desire Me (Greta Garbo), Mourning Becomes Electra (Rosalind Russell) and The Old Maid (Bette Davis.) It’s a testament to her own versatility that the roles she did on stage could be inherited by other, such dissimilar, cinema actresses. She also played Gertrude to John Gielgud’s Hamlet in 1936.

1937 brought her to London in order to portray Lady Macbeth opposite Laurence Olivier. Four years later, she reprised the role with Maurice Evans as Macbeth. (She and Evans would later play these roles on television two separate times as well! The second time the play was made for TV, in 1960, the program was fashioned into a feature film that played in Europe in 1963. Also, she took home an Emmy both times she played Lady M. on TV!)

Anderson had worked on one film in 1933 and was uncharacteristically glamorous, dripping with jewelry in fact, in it. In Blood Money, she was a bordello madam who puts a hit out on a man. It was the type of part that would soon seem inconceivable to her fans and, more in particular, to the studio honchos in Hollywood.

Her major film break came in 1940 when she landed the part of the chilling, severe and intimidating Mrs. Danvers in Alfred Hitchcock’s production of Rebecca. The popular book described a far older and crustier version of the creepy, insinuating housekeeper to Laurence Olivier and his new wife Joan Fontaine. No one was complaining because Anderson was searing in the part and really unforgettable! (And Judith's amazing and distinctive profile was put to good use here and many times later in her career.)

Opting to keep the character’s background as secretive and mysterious as possible, he deliberately filmed her in a way that suggested that she merely appeared rather than having walked to whichever location she was in. With her pitch-dark dress with a pale, terse face resting on top, finished off with a tightly knotted braid around her head, she cut a scary figure to Fontaine’s unsophisticated and shy character. She was the devoted servant to Olivier’s first wife, the deceased title character of the film, and provided, with Hitch’s help surely, an overriding subtext of conflicted lesbian devotion.

This callous, domineering role (which would become iconic and spoofed many times) of a woman who would rather die than allow her mistress’s things to be destroyed won Anderson a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination. Amazingly enough, it was the only time she would ever be nominated for the little gold man (she lost to Jane Darwell in The Grapes of Wrath.)

A spate of film roles came her way, though her looks were always considered of a character sort, preventing her from playing heroines and most leads. She was able to shake off the spectre of Mrs. Danvers by immediately going into Forty Little Mothers, an Eddie Cantor comedy in which she was a girl’s school headmistress. In Free and Easy, the following year, she also played a lighter type of role, a flighty, wealthy woman being charmed by Bob Cummings.

Despite playing the title character in Lady Scarface, she was still very much a supporting performer. More screen time went to Dennis O’Keefe and his female sidekick Frances Neal, though Anderson gave the same caliber of commitment and toughness to her role that she had in her best-known part.

All Through the Night had her involved in the strange story of mobsters (such as Humphrey Bogart) attempting to thwart Nazis (such as Conrad Veidt, shown here with her.) Kings Row in 1942 was a sort of precursor to Peyton Place in that it dealt with the unsavory and secret goings on in a small town. She played the mother of one of Kings Rows’ troubled inhabitants.

The Errol Flynn actioner Edge of Darkness had her fighting the Nazis again and working with Walter Huston and Ruth Gordon. She had just done a heavily lauded Broadway production of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters with Gordon and Katharine Cornell. The play was greeted with such enthusiasm that Time Magazine did a feature story on it and placed the three actresses on its cover. Anderson, while working regularly in films, had not turned her back on the (doubtlessly more satisfying) stage.

A pair of future classics came about in 1944 and ’45. First up was Laura, a nourish mystery about the death of a beautiful girl (played by Gene Tierney.) Anderson played her aunt, who is involved mostly with Vincent Price. Price looks remarkably handsome here, I must say. Then came And Then There Were None, an adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians, in which she was the prim Emily Brent. This film version is still considered by many people to be the best one (the story has been remade many times since.) She was allowed to toss out the hilariously blase line, "Very stupid to kill the only servant in the house. Now we don't even know where to find the marmalade."

In Anderson’s next two films, she managed to expand her range to include a hysterically obsessive lady of the house in Diary of a Chambermaid and an exacting ballet instructor in Specter of the Rose. It’s not unusual to find her all but stealing the show in these films or at least walking away with the acting kudos. More opportunities in the cinema came her way when she was cast as Barbara Stanwyck’s wicked aunt in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers and later when she portrayed the adoptive mother of Robert Mitchum in the dark, flashback-ridden western Pursued. In it, she must try to dissuade the embittered and one-armed Dean Jagger from killing her boy until he grows up to be Mitchum and can possibly defend himself.

She played Edward G Robinson’s spinster sister in The Red House and had a bland role in the colorful Tycoon as the unappreciated tutor to Larraine Day. The John Wayne film had him romancing Day with Anderson’s help, but at the risk of revenge from her disapproving father Cedric Hardwicke. Fans of the later The Ten Commandments may get a mild kick out of seeing Anderson and Hardwicke acting in such a different way in Tycoon than they did in the Egyptian epic. It’s not that she was terrible in “nice” roles like this. It just seems such a waste when she could be such a charismatic and steely villainess.

One of her greatest ever triumphs of this period would be on the Broadway stage. She played Medea in 1947, taking home a Tony award and thrilling audiences for years afterwards in touring productions. The legendary role of a woman who kills her own children seemed tailor-made for Anderson, who projected both passion and power. Famed Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini allegedly got so caught up in applause for her in this role that he nearly fell out of his box seat! Working in Medea kept Anderson off the screen for a couple of years. (She would also appear in a televised rendition of it in 1959.)

In 1950, she squared off with another tough chickie, Barbara Stanwyck, in The Furies. Stanwyck played the feisty and headstrong daughter of a wealthy rancher (Walter Huston) whose plans to inherit the spread are threatened by his relationship with Anderson, a widow. The ladies butt heads and it’s one time Anderson found herself taking on someone who wasn’t easily intimidated.

Anderson began working on the then-popular television anthologies (even playing Laura Hope Crews’ smothering mother role in an adaptation of The Silver Cord.) In 1953, Rita Hayworth produced a colorful Biblical epic for herself called Salome and Anderson was hired to play Herodias, her evil mother. Charles Laughton played Anderson’s husband Herod. (She's seen here with Arnold Moss.) The film garnered most of its attention for the elaborate and erotic (for 1953) dance that Hayworth performs, though the script ignored The Bible and had Salome dancing to save John the Baptist rather than have him beheaded as was written in the text! Some of the snarkier viewers wondered if Salome got her slam-bang looks from her (unseen) father...

Plenty of TV work continued until Cecil B. DeMille began his monumental epic The Ten Commandments. The mammoth, exceedingly colorful (and campy) 1956 film was packed with stars (including old costars such as Robinson, Hardwicke and Price) and Anderson took her rightful place among them in the advertising. Her role was small, but memorable. She portrayed Memnet, the servant to the Egyptian princess (Nina Foch) who finds and raises the infant Moses as her own.

Once Moses has grown up into Charlton Heston and is in love with Anne Baxter, for whom Anderson is now a servant as well, Anderson threatens to reveal the true origins of Heston’s birth. It was a decidedly unglamorous part and one who isn’t familiar with her could be forgiven for thinking that this is a photo of a man! Still, her craggy, sour presence adds a lot of fun to her few brief scenes.

In ’58, she played the fretful, forceful, fussy and frantic Big Mama in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The great cast included Paul Newman, Elizabeth Taylor and Burl Ives (as well as the divinely snotty Madeleine Sherwood!) It’s still causing genetic scientists fits as to exactly how the sperm of Burl Ives and the egg of Judith Anderson could possibly have resulted in the blisteringly beautiful Paul Newman! Jack Carson, as their other son, seems a more likely offspring.

Jerry Lewis used her as his wicked stepmother in the strained comic spoof Cinderfella, which had him as the put upon stepsibling (trapped in servitude) who wants to go to the ball to meet a princess while his stepbrothers Henry Silva and Robert Hutton are given all the attention from Anderson. He even had a fairy godfather played by Ed Wynn.

Next was a supporting role in the Richard Todd-Elke Sommer sex comedy Why Bother to Knock. (Some sources erroneously list her as being in Don’t Bother to Knock, which was an earlier black & white Marilyn Monroe film!) She’s seen here with actress June Thorburn who, six years later, was killed in a plane crash while five months pregnant. Prior to the film’s 1961 release, Anderson was named a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire for her work in the performing arts.

Anderson went into semiretirement soon after this with occasional TV or stage projects. In 1970, she joined Richard Harris in A Man Called Horse as a weathered American Indian woman with the incredibly delicate, feminine and flattering name of Buffalo Cow Head. The memorably violent film had Harris strung up by his chest with hooks in a ceremonial ritual. It was her first big screen credit using the moniker “Dame Judith Anderson.”
She then, at age 74, got to fulfill a lifelong dream. She, as many actresses before her had done in a longstanding theatrical conceit, played Hamlet in a touring production!

In 1975, Joan Bennett was set to star in an unusual Australian horror western called Inn of the Damned, but pulled out after a disagreement with the director over her character. Anderson stepped into the part and it can count as her horror-battle axe credit. She and her husband were proprietors of the title business who were out for revenge over the abduction of their two children years earlier.

Then in 1982, after more than twenty years away and after more than two-dozen productions to her credit there, Anderson returned to the Broadway stage. It was, again, in the play Medea, but this time she portrayed the role of the nurse. Receiving a Tony nomination, it was a fitting end to her stage career in The Big Apple. The play was filmed and presented on television the following year (with some publicity material centering more on her than on the star of the production!)

The attention she got from Medea quite possibly led to her being cast as the Vulcan High Priestess in the feature film Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. Duded out in the famous Vulcan pointy ears and swathed in layers of fabric, she lent just the right touch of vaguely menacing authority and stature to the brief role. Some of the cast photos from the film show her seated in the center while all the others are gathered around her in proper respect for her (and her character’s) position. It was a job that suggested she wasn’t afraid to try new things, though she was, by now, 87 years of age!
She had one final surprise in store and that was when she helped to launch the daytime soap opera Santa Barbara in 1984. Playing the matriarchal Minx Lockridge, her name and face appeared all over the press. (And I must say I adore her expression here as the perfectly named grande dame, Minx!) Unfortunately for her, she was not utilized nearly enough for her satisfaction during her stint on the show, though she did limp along for three years, making periodic appearances. She also took her honored place in the center of the cast shots. When she departed in 1987, the character was written out only to be restored three years later with the twenty-five years younger Janis Paige taking over the part!!
Anderson really did live in Santa Barbara and that is where she resided until her death at 94 from pneumonia. There were two reasonably brief (one two-year and one five-year) childless marriages in her life, both after she was forty and both over and done with by 1951. Many sources outright declare her lesbianism, though she lived most of her life in an era where such things would never be openly discussed in any case. A treasure of the stage and a memorable cinema actress as well, there really was nothin’ like Dame Judith Anderson!