Ziegfeld girl and Broadway success
In 1923, a few months before her 16th birthday, Ruby auditioned for a place in the chorus at the Strand Roof, a nightclub over the Strand Theatre in Times Square.[21] A few months later, she obtained a job as a dancer in the 1922 and 1923 seasons of the Ziegfeld Follies, dancing at the New Amsterdam Theater. "I just wanted to survive and eat and have a nice coat", Stanwyck said.[22][23] For the next several years, she worked as a chorus girl, performing from midnight to seven a.m. at nightclubs owned by Texas Guinan. She also occasionally served as a dance instructor at a speakeasy for gays and lesbians owned by Guinan.[24] One of her good friends during those years was pianist Oscar Levant, who described her as being "wary of sophisticates and phonies".[22]
Billy LaHiff, who owned a popular pub frequented by showpeople, introduced Ruby in 1926 to impresario Willard Mack.[25] Mack was casting his play The Noose, and LaHiff suggested that the part of the chorus girl be played by a real one. Mack agreed, and after a successful audition gave the part to Ruby.[26] She co-starred with Rex Cherryman and Wilfred Lucas.[27] As initially staged, the play was not a success.[28] In an effort to improve it, Mack decided to expand Ruby's part to include more pathos.[29] The Noose re-opened on October 20, 1926, and became one of the most successful plays of the season, running on Broadway for nine months and 197 performances.[23] At the suggestion of David Belasco, Ruby changed her name to Barbara Stanwyck by combining the first name of the title character in the play Barbara Frietchie with the last name of the actress in the play, Jane Stanwyck; both were found on a 1906 theater program.[28][30]
Stanwyck became a Broadway star soon afterward, when she was cast in her first leading role in Burlesque (1927). She received rave reviews, and it was a huge hit.[31] Film actor Pat O'Brien would later say on a 1960s talk show, "The greatest Broadway show I ever saw was a play in the 1920s called 'Burlesque'." Arthur Hopkins described in his autobiography To a Lonely Boy, how he came to cast Stanwyck:
After some search for the girl, I interviewed a nightclub dancer who had just scored in a small emotional part in a play that did not run [The Noose]. She seemed to have the quality I wanted, a sort of rough poignancy. She at once displayed more sensitive, easily expressed emotion than I had encountered since Pauline Lord. She and [Hal] Skelly were the perfect team, and they made the play a great success. I had great plans for her, but the Hollywood offers kept coming. There was no competing with them. She became a picture star. She is Barbara Stanwyck.
He also called Stanwyck "The greatest natural actress of our time", noting with sadness, "One of the theater's great potential actresses was embalmed in celluloid."[32]
Around this time, Stanwyck was given a screen test by producer Bob Kane for his upcoming 1927 silent film Broadway Nights. She lost the lead role because she could not cry in the screen test, but was given a minor part as a fan dancer. This was Stanwyck's first film appearance.[33]
While playing in Burlesque, Stanwyck was introduced to her future husband, actor Frank Fay, by Oscar Levant.[34] Stanwyck and Fay were married on August 26, 1928, and soon moved to Hollywood.[13]
Film career
Stanwyck's first sound film was The Locked Door (1929), followed by Mexicali Rose, released in the same year. Neither film was successful; nonetheless, Frank Capra chose Stanwyck for his film Ladies of Leisure (1930). Her work in that production established an enduring friendship with the director and led to future roles in his films.[23] Other prominent roles followed, among them as a nurse who saves two little girls from the villainous chauffeur (Clark Gable) in Night Nurse (1931). In Edna Ferber's novel brought to screen by William Wellman, she portrays small town teacher and valiant Midwest farm woman Selena in So Big! (1932). She followed with a performance as an ambitious woman "sleeping" her way to the top from "the wrong side of the tracks" in Baby Face (1933), a controversial pre-Code classic.[35] In The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933), another controversial pre-Code film by director Capra, Stanwyck portrays an idealistic Christian caught behind the lines of Chinese civil war kidnapped by warlord Nils Asther. A flop at the time, containing "mysterious-East mumbo jumbo", the lavish film is "dark stuff, and it's difficult to imagine another actress handling this ... philosophical conversion as fearlessly as Ms. Stanwyck does. She doesn't make heavy weather of it."[36]
Regarding her pre-Code work, Mick LaSalle, movie critic for the San Francisco Chronicle said "If you've never seen Stanwyck in a pre-Code film, you've never seen Stanwyck. (The Code began to be enforced seriously beginning in July 1934.) Never in her career, including "Double Indemnity," was she ever as hard-boiled as she was in the early 1930s. She had a wonderful quality of being both incredibly cool and yet blazingly passionate. Her cynicism was profound, and then, without warning, she would explode into shrieking, sobbing."[37]
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In Stella Dallas (1937) she plays the self-sacrificing title character who eventually allows her teenage daughter to live a better life somewhere else. She landed her first Academy Award nomination for Best Actress when she was able to portray her character as vulgar, yet sympathetic as required by the movie. Next, she played Molly Monahan in Union Pacific (1939) with Joel McCrea. Stanwyck was reportedly one of the many actresses considered for the role of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939), although she did not receive a screen test.[23] In Meet John Doe she plays an ambitious newspaperwoman with Gary Cooper (1941).
In Preston Sturges's romantic comedy The Lady Eve (1941), she plays a slinky, sophisticated con-woman who "gives off an erotic charge that would straighten a boa constrictor",[38] while falling in love with her intended mark, the guileless, wealthy herpetologist, played by Henry Fonda.[39] Film critic David Thomson described Stanwyck as "giving one of the best American comedy performances",[2] and she was reviewed as brilliantly versatile in "her bravura double performance" by The Guardian.[40] The Lady Eve is among the top 100 movies of all time on Time and Entertainment Weekly's lists,[41][42] and is considered to be both a great comedy and a great romantic film with its placement at #55 on the AFI's 100 Years...100 Laughs list and #26 on its 100 Years...100 Passions list.[43]
Next, she was the extremely successful, independent doctor Helen Hunt in You Belong to Me (1941), also with Fonda. Stanwyck then played nightclub performer Sugarpuss O'Shea in the Howard Hawks directed, but Billy Wilder written comedy Ball of Fire (1941). In this update of the Snow White and Seven Dwarfs tale, she gives professor Bertram Potts (played by Gary Cooper) a better understanding of "modern English" in the performance for which she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.[44][45]
"That is the kind of woman that makes whole civilizations topple." -- Kathleen Howard of Stanwyck's character in Ball of Fire.[46]
In Double Indemnity (1944), the seminal film noir thriller directed by Billy Wilder, she plays the sizzling blonde tramp[47]/"destiny in high heels"[48] who lures an infatuated insurance salesman (Fred MacMurray), into killing her husband.[47] Stanwyck brings out the cruel nature of the "grim, unflinching murderess", marking her as the "most notorious femme fatale" in the film noir genre.[49] Her performance as the "insolent, self-possessed wife is one of the screen's definitive studies of villainy – and should (it is widely thought) have won the Oscar for Best Actress",[47] not just been nominated.[48] Double Indemnity is usually considered to be among the top 100 films of all time, though it did not win any of its seven Academy Award nominations. It is the #38 film of all time on the American Film Institute's list, as well as the #24 on its 100 Years...100 Thrills list and #84 on its 100 Years...100 Passions list.[50][51]
She plays a columnist touted as the "greatest cook in the country" caught up in white lies while trying to pursue a romance in the comedy Christmas in Connecticut (1945).[52] It was a hit upon release and remains a treasured holiday classic today.[53] In 1946 she was "liquid nitrogen" as Martha, a manipulative murderess, starring with Van Heflin and newcomer Kirk Douglas in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers.[54][55] Stanwyck was also the vulnerable, invalid wife that overhears her own murder being plotted in Sorry, Wrong Number (1948)[56] and the doomed concert pianist in The Other Love (1947). In the latter film's soundtrack, the piano music is actually being performed by Ania Dorfmann, who drilled Stanwyck for three hours a day until the actress was able to synchronize the motion of her arms and hands to match the music's tempo, giving a convincing impression that it is Stanwyck playing the piano.[57]
Pauline Kael, a longtime film critic for The New Yorker, admired the natural appearance of Stanwyck's acting style on screen, noting that she "seems to have an intuitive understanding of the fluid physical movements that work best on camera".[58] In reference to the actress's film work during the early sound era, Kael observed that the "[e]arly talkies sentimentality ... only emphasizes Stanwyck's remarkable modernism."[58]
Many of her roles involve strong characters, yet Stanwyck was known for her accessibility and kindness to the backstage crew on any film set. She knew the names of many of their wives and children. Frank Capra said of Stanwyck: "She was destined to be beloved by all directors, actors, crews and extras. In a Hollywood popularity contest, she would win first prize, hands down."[59] While working on 1954's Cattle Queen of Montana (also starring Ronald Reagan) on location in Glacier National Park, she performed some of her own stunts, including a swim in the icy lake.[54] At the age of 50, she performed an extremely difficult stunt in Forty Guns. The scene called for her character to fall from and be dragged by a horse, and the stunt was so dangerous that the film's professional stuntman refused to perform it.[60] She would later be named an honorary member of the Hollywood Stuntmen's Hall of Fame.[61]
William Holden and Stanwyck were longtime friends and when they were presenting the Best Sound Oscar for 1977, he paused to pay a special tribute to her for saving his career when Holden was cast in the lead for Golden Boy (1939). After a series of unsteady daily performances, he was about to be fired, but Stanwyck staunchly defended him, successfully standing up to the film producers. Shortly after Holden's death, Stanwyck recalled the moment when receiving her honorary Oscar: "A few years ago, I stood on this stage with William Holden as a presenter. I loved him very much, and I miss him. He always wished that I would get an Oscar. And so, tonight, my golden boy, you got your wish."[62]
Television career
As Stanwyck's film career declined during the 1950s, she moved to television. In 1958, she guest-starred in "Trail to Nowhere", an episode of the Western anthology series Dick Powell's Zane Grey Theatre, playing a wife who kills a man to avenge her husband.[63][64] In 1961, she hosted an anthology drama series titled The Barbara Stanwyck Show that was not a ratings success but earned her an Emmy Award.[23] The show ran for a total of 36 episodes.[65] During this period, she also guest-starred on other television series such as The Untouchables and four episodes of Wagon Train.
She stepped back into film for the 1964 Elvis Presley film Roustabout, in which she plays a carnival owner.
The Western television series The Big Valley, which was broadcast on ABC from 1965 to 1969, made Stanwyck one of the most popular actresses on television, winning her another Emmy.[23] She was billed in the series' opening credits as Miss Barbara Stanwyck for her role as Victoria, the widowed matriarch of the wealthy Barkley family.
In 1983, Stanwyck won an Emmy for The Thorn Birds, her third such award.[23] In 1985, she made three guest appearances in the primetime soap opera Dynasty prior to the launch of its short-lived spinoff series The Colbys, in which she starred alongside Charlton Heston, Stephanie Beacham and Katharine Ross. Unhappy with the experience, Stanwyck remained with the series for only the first season, and her role as Constance Colby Patterson would be her last.[23] It was rumored that Earl Hamner Jr., former producer of The Waltons, had initially wanted Stanwyck for the role of Angela Channing in the 1980s soap opera Falcon Crest, and she turned it down, with the role going to her friend Jane Wyman, but Hamner assured Wyman that it was only a rumor.[66]