Oscar Profile #53: Margaret Sullavan

Born May 16, 1909 in Norfolk, Virginia to a wealthy stockbroker and his heiress wife, Margaret Sullavan had a privileged upbringing that included education at some of the country’s best schools.

A member of the University Players at Harvard, along with Henry Fonda and James Stewart, she was on tour with the group when she married Fonda on Christmas Day, 1931. The marriage lasted just 11 months.

After several flops on Broadway, her featured role as a replacement in Dinner at Eight brought her to the attention of director John M. Stahl, who recommended her for the starring role in her first film, 1933’s Only Yesterday. She did not like herself in it and thereafter took charge of her career, picking and choosing her roles very carefully, appearing in only fourteen more films between 1934 and 1943, after which she concentrated on her stage career and raising her family with third husband Leland Hayward. She returned to the screen just once more after their divorce.

Sullavan’s first film after Only Yesterday was Frank Borzage’s well-received Little Man, What Now? about a young couple struggling to make ends meet in post-world War I Germany. She then made the classic comedy, The Good Fairy for second husband William Wyler. The film was a success but their marriage wasn’t and would end in 1936.

She next starred in the civil war drama, So Red the Rose and the romantic adventure The Moon’s Our Home opposite former husband Fonda.

Re-uniting with Borzage, she starred opposite Robert Taylor, Franchot Tone and Robert Young in Three Comrades, another bittersweet post-World War I drama set in Germany, earning the New York Film critics Award and her only Oscar nomination for her exquisite performance.

Three of her next four films were opposite long-time friend James Stewart and proved to be the most popular of her career. They were the World War I romantic drama, The Shopworn Angel; the Budapest set bon-bon, The Shop Around the Corner and one of Hollywood’s first, and best, anti-Nazi dramas set in the German Alps, The Mortal Storm.

The ensuing Holocaust was also the background for 1941’s So Ends Our Night in which Sullavan stars opposite Fredric March and Glenn Ford in his breakthrough role as her young lover. Sullavan and Charles Boyer then joined forces to breathe new life into the old tear-jerker, Back Street, the two following that with the now-forgotten romantic comedy, Appointment for Love

Sullavan, Ann Sothern, Joan Blondell and Fay Bainter headed the practically all-female cast of 1943’s tribute to Army nurses, Cry Havoc. It would be her last film for seven years.

By 1950, her three volatile marriages to Fonda, Wyler and Hayward in the past, she married English investment banker Kenneth Wagg and seemed to have settled into a nice middle-aged complacency, during which she made only one more film, 1950’s No Sad Songs for Me. Her portrayal of a dying mother precipitated her own premature death less than ten years later.

Suffering from hearing loss during rehearsals for a play, the despondent Sullavan died of a drug overdose on New Year’s Day, 1960. Although her death was ruled accidental, it is generally believed to been suicide. Her youngest daughter committed suicide less than a year later at 21 and her only son would commit suicide in 2008 at the age of 66. Her eldest daughter, Brooke Hayward, wrote the best-selling Haywire about growing up the daughter of Margaret Sullavan. The 1980 TV mini-series starring Lee Remick was nominated for three Emmys.

ESSENTIAL FILMS

LITTLE MAN, WHAT NOW? (1934), directed by Frank Borzage

Sullavan is at her luminous best as a young bride whose marriage in post-World War I Germany must be kept secret to protect husband Douglass Montgomery’s job. When their secret is revealed they are forced to move in with his brothel madam step-mother (Catherine Doucet) and her pimp husband (Alan Hale). The eventual happy ending seems forced, but Sullavan and Montgomery ring true throughout. The film’s snipes at the early days of Naziism are quite subtle, nothing like the full-out expose of Borzage’s The Mortal Storm with Sullavan six years later.

THREE COMRADES (1938), directed by Frank Borzage

The rise of Nazism is more noticeable but still not the main theme in the second Sullavan-Borzage collaboration in which Sullavan is the dying girl who comes into the lives of three World War I German veterans played by Robert Taylor, Franchot Tone and Robert Young. Erich Maria Remarque wrote the source novel and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edward Paramore, Jr. the screenplay. Remarque’s characters could well be grown-up versions of his teenage soldiers in All Quiet on the Western Front.

THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER (1940), directed by Ernst Lubitsch

The first of several screen versions of Miklos Laszlo’s Hungarian play, Parfumerie, Sullavan and James Stewart are at their subtle comic best as feuding store clerks who are also secret pen-pals. Lubitsch’s lighter than air touch has never been better employed and the supporting cast, which includes Frank Morgan, Joseph Schildkraut, Sara Haden and William Tracy is all perfectly cast. Later remade as In the Good Old Summertime; She Loves Me and You’ve Got Mail, this remains the best version.

BACK STREET (1941), directed by Robert Stevenson

Sullavan and Charles Boyer were perfectly cast as the ill-fated lovers in the second of three versions of Fannie Hurst’s tearjerker. It’s a slight improvement over the 1932 original with Irene Dunne and John Boles. Whereas that film had very little music, this one has an exquisite Oscar nominated score by Frank Skinner. The less said about the 1961 version with Susan Hyaward and John Gavin, the better.

NO SAD SONGS FOR ME (1950), directed by Rudolph Mate

Sullavan’s luminosity lifts this one well above the ranks of ordinary tearjerker. Playing a woman who thinks she is pregnant, but learns that it is an inoperable tumor she’s carrying, Sullavan spends the rest of the film trying to keep the secret from her husband (Wendell Corey) and daughter (Natalie Wood). Eventually the secret comes out and Sullavan then sets about mending fences, including setting up her husband’s assistant (Viveca Lindfors) as his prospective second wife after her death.