Oscar Profile #192: Marjorie Rambeau

Born July 15, 1889 in San Francisco, California, Marjorie Rambeau was a precocious child who moved with her mother to Nome, Alaska after her parents separated. Put on stage by her mother to entertain the locals singing and playing the banjo in saloons and music halls, she was forced to dress as a boy to keep the drunks at bay. Acting by the age of 12, she made her Broadway debut at 24 in 1913 in Willard Mack’s Kick In, marrying the 40 year-old writer-actor-director-producer that same year. The marriage would end in 1917 the same year she made her film debut in The Greater Woman.

Now revered as the “toast of Broadway”, Rambeau simultaneously starred in eight films made between 1917 and 1920, none of which were really successful. She married second husband, actor Hugh Dillman, in 1919, divorcing him in 1923, and gave her last performance on Broadway in 1926’s Just Life.

Moving to Hollywood, Rambeau made her talkie debut in 1930’s Her Man in support of Helen Twelvetrees and Phillips Holmes. Later that year she was the villainess in the box-office smash Min and Bill in support of Marie Dressler and Wallace Beery. She married third husband Francis Grudger in 1931, remaining married to him until his death in 1967.

Rambeau had featured roles in an additional twenty-nine films in the 1930s but didn’t attract critical attention until a trio of films in 1940. Playing Ginger Rogers’ thinly disguised prostitute mother in Primrose Path she would receive her first Oscar nomination. Her role opposite Wallace Beery in 20 Mule Team led to her starring role in Tugboat Annie Rides Again reprising Marie Dressler’s classic character opposite Beery in 1933’s Tugboat Annie.

Her hillbilly Sister Bessie in 1941’s Tobacco Road was her most high profile role of the remainder of the decade. Almost killed in a foggy car crash in 1945, she was off the screen until 1948 and had another break in acting from 1949 to 1953.

Rambeau received a second Oscar nomination for her portrayal of Joan Crawford’s mother in the critically lambasted 1953 musical, Torch Song. She earned a National Board of Review award for her back-to-back performances as town dowagers in 1955’s A Man Called Peter and The View from Pompey’s Head.

More frequently on TV than in films in the mid-1950s, Rambeau returned the screen for the last time in two 1957 films, Slander and Man of a Thousand Faces.

Awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960, Rambeau lived in quiet retirement in Palm Springs until her death in 1970 a few days before what would have been her 81st birthday.

ESSENTIAL FILMS

MIN AND BILL (1930), directed by George Hill

Min and Bill was one of the most popular films of its day. It catapulted sixty year-old character actress Marie Dressler to superstardom, earning her recognition as the no. one box-office star, a position she would hold until her death in 1934 after which the title went in the opposite direction to child star Shirley Temple.

Although she would win an Oscar for her role here, Dressler had been better in her supporting role earlier that year in Anna Christie and would be better still in 1932’s Emma and 1933’s Dinner at Eight and Tugboat Annie, the latter a superior pairing of Dressler and her co-star here, Wallace Beery.

The scene that earned Dressler her Oscar was her climactic battle royal with Rambeau as the mother of Dorothy Jordan, the young girl Rambeau had abandoned years earlier. Had supporting Oscars been given that year, Rambeau would surely have received a nomination for her unfogettable portrayal of the trashy mother.

PRIMROSE PATH (1940), directed by Gregory LaCava

It took ten years but Rambeau finally received an Oscar nomination for one of her by now patented trashy mothers.

Prostitution is never mentioned in the film, but it’s obvious that is the profession Rambeau is engaged in and that her mother (Queenie Vasser) encourages Rambeau’s daughter (Ginger Rogers) to join her in.

The film is never as sordid as the material would suggest thanks to the classy acting of Rogers and Joel McCrea in the leads and the always wonderful Henry Travers and child actress Joan Carroll in support, but Rambeau and Vasser’s sleazy characters did run afoul of the sensors. The film was banned in Detroit.

TORCH SONG (1953), directed by Charles Walters

Joan Crawford is a tough Broadway musical star in one of her least popular roles. An obviously dubbed Crawford lip synchs her way badly through several songs including a much maligned blackface number called “Two-Faced Woman”.

It isn’t until the 56 minute mark that Rambeau makes her first appearance as Crawford’s plain-speaking mother to bring a little levity to the film. The scene only lasts a couple of minutes but she’s back at the 76 minute mark of the 89 minute film for another couple of minutes to knock some sense into Crawford’s character’s head. The result was the veteran actress’s second Oscar nomination.

SLANDER (1957), directed by Roy Rowland

Based on an earlier TV play with James Daly, Mercedes McCambridge and Sheppard Strudwick in the roles played in the film by Van Johnson, Ann Blyth and Steve Cochran, this was a searing indictment of the scandal rags that proliferated in the mid-1950s.

Cochran is the publisher who threatens to publish a story about TV star Johnson if he doesn’t give him dirt on a famous movie star who was a childhood friend of Johnson’s. Blyth as Johnson’s wife begs him to supply the story, but the ethical Johnson refuses to give in to Cochran’s blackmail. Rambeau is Cochran’s mother, an alcoholic who likes the easy life her son provides but hates the means by which he is able to supply it. Her confrontational scene with Blyth and her final moments with Cochran are riveting.

MAN OF A THOUSAND FACES (1957), directed by Joseph Pevney

James Cagney had one of his best late career roles as silent screen legend Lon Chaney in this well-regarded biopic featuring excellent support from Dorothy Malone and Jane Greer as Chaney’s wives and Roger Smith as his son Creighton who later became a star in his own right as Lon Chaney, Jr.

Rambeau, in her last screen appearance, had a field day playing an elderly extra who worked with Chaney in his early screen days. Rambeau, who was a contemporary of Chaney’s in her youth, had never actually worked with him.