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Barbara Stanwyck (; born Ruby Catherine Stevens; July 16, 1907 – January 20, 1990) was an American actress and dancer. A stage, film, and television star, during her 60-year professional career, she was known for her strong, realistic screen presence and versatility. She was a favorite of directors, including Cecil B. DeMille, Fritz Lang, and Frank Capra, and made 86 films in 38 years before turning to television. She received numerous accolades, including three Primetime Emmy Awards and a Golden Globe Award, and was nominated for four Academy Awards.
Orphaned at the age of four and partially raised in foster homes, she always worked. One of her directors, Jacques Tourneur, said of her, "She only lives for two things, and both of them are work."Basinger, Jeanine, The Star Machine, Knopf, 2007, p. 371 She made her debut on stage in the chorus as a Ziegfeld Follies girl in 1923 at age 16, and within a few years was acting in plays. Her first lead role, which was in the hit Burlesque (1927), established her as a Broadway star. In 1929, she transitioned from the stage to the film industry, and began acting in Sound film, the first of which was George Archainbaud's The Locked Door, where her naturalistic acting style and unaffected vocal delivery were instantly evident. Frank Capra chose her for his romantic drama Ladies of Leisure (1930), and Stanwyck later became a favorite of Capra’s, leading to another three collaborations. This led to additional leading roles which raised her profile, such as Night Nurse (1931), Baby Face (1933), the controversial The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933), and Gambling Lady (1934).
By the late 1930s, Stanwyck had moved to more mature roles in critically and commercially successful comedies and dramas. For her performance as the titular character in Stella Dallas (1937), she earned her first Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. In 1941, she starred in two screwball comedy: Ball of Fire with Gary Cooper, and The Lady Eve with Henry Fonda. She received her second Academy Award nomination for Ball of Fire, and in the decades since its release, The Lady Eve has come to be regarded as a comedic classic, with Stanwyck's performance widely hailed as one of the best in American comedy. Other successful films during this period are Remember the Night (1940), Meet John Doe (1940) and You Belong to Me (1941), reteaming her with Cooper and Fonda, respectively, The Gay Sisters (1942), and Lady of Burlesque (1943).
By 1944, Stanwyck had become the highest-paid actress in the United States. That year, she received a third Academy Award nomination for Best Actress in the film noir Double Indemnity, playing a wife who persuades an insurance salesman to kill her husband. In 1945, she played a homemaker columnist in the holiday classic Christmas in Connecticut, and the following year, starred as the titular femme fatale in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers. For the remainder of the decade, Stanwyck starred in additional successes ranging from romantic dramas and comedies, to suspenseful, crime-noirs. Her films during this period include My Reputation (1946), The Two Mrs. Carrolls (1947), Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), for which she received her fourth and final Academy Award nomination, and East Side, West Side (1949). By the early 1950s, Stanwyck’s career began to decline, despite a fair number of leading and major supporting roles, the most successful being Clash by Night (1952), Jeopardy (1953), and Executive Suite (1954). In the 1960s, Stanwyck had made a successful transition to television, where she won three Emmy Awards, for The Barbara Stanwyck Show (1961), the Western series The Big Valley (1966), and the miniseries The Thorn Birds (1983).
She received an Honorary Oscar in 1982, the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award in 1986, and several other honorary lifetime awards. In 1999 she is ranked as the 11th-greatest female star of classic American cinema by the American Film Institute. American Film Institute; retrieved November 17, 2011.
Stanwyck had three older sisters, Laura Mildred (called Millie, b. 1886), Viola Maud (b. 1889) and Mabel (b. 1890), and one older brother, Malcolm Byron (b. 1905). The family had relocated from New England to Flatbush, Brooklyn the year before Stanwyck was born in search of better work opportunities for Byron. In July 1911, four-year-old Stanwyck and her six-year-old brother were riding a streetcar with their mother when a drunk passenger fell and pushed the mother off the vehicle. Kitty Stevens was heavily pregnant at the time, and the accident induced early labor, which caused fatal sepsis. Byron Stevens' alcoholism worsened after his wife's death, and he left the family soon after. He joined a work crew digging the Panama Canal in 1912, dying there some years later in an epidemic.
Stanwyck's sisters were already adults when their mother died, but while they stayed closely involved in their younger siblings' lives, they could not take care of them full-time. In the years following the disintegration of their family, Stanwyck and her brother lived in a series of unofficial foster homes (mostly friends of the family) in Flatbush. As the foster homes could only accommodate one child at a time, the siblings were separated, which caused them additional distress. Around 1919, Stanwyck and her brother moved in with their older sister Viola Maud and her family.
| I knew that after fourteen I'd have to earn my own living, but I was willing to do that ... I've always been a little sorry for pampered people, and of course, they're "very" sorry for me. |
| Barbara Stanwyck, 1937Madsen 1994, pp. 11-13. |
After graduating from P.S. 152, Stanwyck decided to not attend high school. Starting at 14, she took a series of customer-service and secretarial positions, which allowed her to gain financial independence while pursuing her goal of becoming a celebrated dancer.
Billy LaHiff, who owned a popular pub frequented by show people, introduced Stanwyck in 1926 to impresario Willard Mack, who was casting his play The Noose.Madsen 1994, p. 21. Stanwyck successfully auditioned for the part of the chorus girl.Madsen 1994, p. 22. As initially staged, the play was not a success. In an effort to improve it, Mack decided to expand Stanwyck's part to include more pathos.Madsen 1994, p. 25. The Noose reopened in October 1926, and became one of the most successful plays of the season, running on Broadway theatre for nine months and 198 performances. At the suggestion of David Belasco, Stanwyck 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.Madsen 1994, p. 26.
Stanwyck had her first leading role in Burlesque (1927), which was a critical and commercial success.Smith 1985, p. 8. Its producer Arthur Hopkins later described casting her because she had "a sort of rough poignancy. She at once displayed more sensitive, easily expressed emotion than I had encountered since Pauline Lord."Hopkins 1937 The same year, Stanwyck made her first film appearance as a fan dancer in Broadway Nights (1927). "Barbara Stanwyck". Arabella-and-co.com. Retrieved: June 19, 2012. While playing in Burlesque, Stanwyck had begun a relationship with actor Frank Fay.Wayne 2009, p. 20. Soon after marrying on August 26, 1928, the couple moved to Los Angeles, where Stanwyck hoped to pursue a career in films.Nassour and Snowberger 2000.
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 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."
In Stella Dallas (1937), she plays the self-sacrificing title character who eventually allows her teenaged 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. 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 confidence woman who "gives off an erotic charge that would straighten a boa constrictor",Michael Gebert, The Encyclopedia of Movie Awards, St. Martin's Paperbacks, New York, 1996, pg. 102. while falling in love with her intended mark, a guileless, wealthy Herpetology, played by Henry Fonda.Schneider, Steven Jay, Ed. (London, 2003). "1000 Movies You Must See Before You Die", Quintessence Editions Limited, pg. 141 Film critic David Thomson described Stanwyck as "giving one of the best American comedy performances", and she was reviewed as brilliantly versatile in "her bravura double performance" by The Guardian. The Lady Eve is among the top 100 movies of all time on Time and Entertainment Weekly's lists, 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.
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.
"That is the kind of woman that makes whole civilizations topple." -- Kathleen Howard of Stanwyck's character in Ball of Fire.Beifuss, John. "A Century of Stanwyck". The Commercial Appeal (Memphis, Tennessee), July 16, 2007.
In Double Indemnity (1944), the seminal film noir thriller directed by Billy Wilder, she plays Phyllis Dietrichson, who lures an infatuated insurance salesman (Fred MacMurray), into killing her husband. Stanwyck was critically hailed for bringing out the cruel nature of the "grim, unflinching murderess", marking her as the "most notorious femme fatale" in the film noir genre.Hannsberry 2009, p. 3. 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 number 38 film of all time on the American Film Institute's list, as well as the number 24 on its 100 Years...100 Thrills list and number 84 on its 100 Years...100 Passions list.
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). |title=Christmas-in-Connecticut "Articles & Reviews: 'Christmas in Connecticut' (1945)" Turner Classic movies It was a hit upon release and remains a treasured holiday classic today. |title=Christmas-in-Connecticut "Articles & Reviews: 'Christmas in Connecticut' (1945)" Turner Classic movies 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. Stanwyck was also the vulnerable, invalid wife who overhears her own murder being plotted in Sorry, Wrong Number (1948) 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 Stanwyck is playing the piano. "Overview: 'The Other Love' (1947)". Turner Classic movies. Retrieved: October 27, 2014.
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".Kael, Pauline. "Quotation of review of the film Ladies of Leisure". 5001 Nights At The Movies, 1991, p. 403. In reference to the actress's film work during the early Sound film era, Kael observed that the "early talkies sentimentality ... only emphasizes Stanwyck's remarkable modernism." 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."Eyman, Scott. "The Lady Stanwyck". The Palm Beach Post (Florida), July 15, 2007, p. 1J. Retrieved via Access World News: June 16, 2009. 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. 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. She was later named an honorary member of the Hollywood Stuntmen's Hall of Fame.
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."Capua 2009, p. 165.
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. She was billed in the series' opening credits as Miss Barbara Stanwyck for her role as Victoria, the widowed Matriarchy of the wealthy Barkley family.
In 1983, Stanwyck won an Emmy for The Thorn Birds, her third such award. 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 was her last. Earl Hamner Jr., former producer of The Waltons, was rumored to have 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.
On August 26, 1928, Stanwyck married her Burlesque co-star Frank Fay. Fay and she later claimed that they had disliked each other at first, but became close after Cherryman's death. Fay was Catholic, so Stanwyck converted for their marriage. She was reportedly unable to have children, and one biographer alleges the cause of her infertility was a botched Unsafe abortion at the age of 15 that resulted in complications.Wilson 2013, p. 51. After moving to Hollywood, the couple adopted a boy. The marriage was troubled; Fay's successful Broadway career did not translate to the big screen, whereas Stanwyck achieved Hollywood stardom. Fay was reportedly physically abusive to Stanwyck, especially when he was inebriated.Wayne 2009, p. 37.Callahan 2012, pp. 36, 38. Some claim that the marriage was the basis for dialogue written by William Wellman, a friend of the couple's, for A Star Is Born (1937) starring Janet Gaynor and Fredric March.Prono 2008, p. 242. The couple divorced on December 30, 1935. Stanwyck won custody of their son, whom she raised with a strict, authoritarian hand and demanding expectations.Callahan 2012, p. 85. Stanwyck and her son became estranged after his childhood, meeting only a few times after he became an adult. Wrote Richard Corliss, the child "resembled her in just one respect: both were, effectively, orphans."Corliss, Richard. "That Old Feelin': Ruby in the Rough". Time, August 12, 2001.
In 1936, while making the film His Brother's Wife (1936), Stanwyck became involved with her co-star, Robert Taylor. Rather than a torrid romance, their relationship was more one of mentor and pupil. Stanwyck served as support and adviser to the younger Taylor, who had come from a small Nebraska town; she guided his career and acclimated him to the sophisticated Hollywood culture. The couple began living together, sparking newspaper reports. Stanwyck was hesitant to remarry after the failure of her first marriage, but their 1939 marriage was arranged with the help of Taylor's studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, a common practice in Hollywood's golden age. Louis B. Mayer had insisted that Stanwyck and Taylor marry and went as far as presiding over arrangements at the wedding.Callahan 2012, p. 75.Wayne 2009, p. 76. Stanwyck and Taylor enjoyed time together outdoors during the early years of their marriage and owned acres of prime West Los Angeles property. Their large ranch and home in the Mandeville Canyon section of Brentwood, Los Angeles, is still referred to by the locals as "the old Robert Taylor ranch". "The 10 most expensive homes in the US: 2005". Forbes (2005); retrieved November 17, 2011.
Stanwyck and Taylor decided in 1950 to divorce, and at his insistence, she proceeded with the official filing of the papers.Wayne 2009, p. 87. Many rumors exist regarding the cause of the divorce, but after World War II, Taylor attempted to create a life away from the entertainment industry, and Stanwyck did not share that goal.Callahan 2012, pp. 87, 164. Taylor allegedly had extramarital affairs, and unsubstantiated rumors suggested that Stanwyck had, also. After the divorce, they remained friendly and acted together in Stanwyck's last feature film, The Night Walker (1964). She never remarried. According to her friend and Big Valley co-star Linda Evans, Stanwyck cited Taylor as the love of her life. She took his death in 1969 very hard, and took a long break from film and television work.Callahan 2012, p. 77.
Stanwyck was one of the best-liked actresses in Hollywood and maintained friendships with many of her fellow actors (as well as crew members of her films and TV shows), including Joel McCrea and his wife Frances Dee, George Brent, Robert Preston, Henry Fonda (who had a longtime crush on her), James Stewart, Linda Evans, Joan Crawford, Jack Benny and his wife Mary Livingstone, William Holden, Gary Cooper, and Fred MacMurray.Wayne 2009, pp. 146, 166. During filming of To Please a Lady, Stanwyck refused to leave her African-American maid Harriet Coray in a hotel only for African-American people and insisted that Harriet stay in the same hotel as she did. After much pressure from Stanwyck, Coray was allowed to stay in the best hotel in Indianapolis with Stanwyck and the rest of the cast and crew.Movie Anecdotes; Peter Hay, 1990.
Stanwyck, at age 45, had a four-year romantic affair with 22-year-old actor Robert Wagner that had begun on the set of Titanic (1953) before Stanwyck ended the relationship.King, Susan. "Wagner Memoir Tells of Wood Death, Stanwyck Affair". San Jose Mercury News (California) October 5, 2008, p. 6D. Retrieved: via Access World News: June 16, 2009. The affair is described in Wagner's 2008 memoir Pieces of My Heart:Wagner and Eyman 2008, p. 64.
A fan of Objectivism author Ayn Rand, Stanwyck persuaded Warner Bros. head Jack L. Warner to purchase the rights to The Fountainhead before it became a bestseller, and she wrote to Rand of her admiration of Atlas Shrugged.Peikoff 1997, pp. 403, 497.
In 1981, in her home in the exclusive Trousdale section of Beverly Hills, she was awakened during the night by an intruder who struck her on the head with his flashlight, forced her into a closet, and absconded with $40,000 in jewelry.
In 1982, while filming The Thorn Birds, Stanwyck inhaled special-effects smoke on the set that may have caused her to contract bronchitis, which was compounded by her cigarette-smoking habit. She began smoking at the age of nine and stopped just four years before her death.
Stanwyck died on January 20, 1990, at the age of 82, from congestive heart failure and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease at Saint John's Health Center in Santa Monica, California. She had indicated that she wanted no funeral service. In accordance with her wishes, her remains were cremated and the ashes scattered from a helicopter over Lone Pine, California, where she had made some of her Western films.Callahan (2012), p. 220.Wilson, Scott. Resting Places: The Burial Sites of More Than 14,000 Famous Persons, 3d ed.: 2 (Kindle Location 44716). McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers.
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