Glenda Farrell

Glenda Farrell (June 30, 1904 – May 1, 1971) was an American actress born in Enid, Oklahoma, whose career in film, television, and theatre spanned more than fifty years. Her father, Charles Farrell, was a horse trader of Irish and Cherokee descent, and her mother, Wilhelmina, known as Minnie, was of German descent and served as the driving force behind her daughter's theatrical ambitions. Farrell had two brothers, Dick and Gene. After the family relocated to Wichita, Kansas, she began performing on stage at age seven, taking the role of Little Eva in Uncle Tom's Cabin with a local theatrical company. As a teenager, following another family move to San Diego, California, she joined the Virginia Brissac Stock Company. She received her formal education at the Mount Carmel Catholic Academy, and by April 1919 her picture and biography appeared in Motion Picture Magazine following her placement on the publication's honor roll.

Farrell's professional stage work accelerated in the late 1920s. In 1928 she was cast as the lead in the play The Spider and made her film debut in a minor role in Lucky Boy. She moved to New York City in 1929, where she replaced Erin O'Brien-Moore as Marion Hardy in Aurania Rouverol's play Skidding, a production that would later serve as the basis for the Andy Hardy film series. By April of that year, she had played the role 355 times. She went on to appear in additional Broadway productions during this period, including Divided Honors, Recapture, and Love, Honor and Betray, the latter featuring George Brent, Alice Brady, and Clark Gable.

In 1930, Farrell was cast as Olga Stassoff, the female lead in director Mervyn LeRoy's gangster film Little Caesar, opposite Edward G. Robinson and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. She subsequently returned to Broadway and starred in On the Spot at the Forrest Theater. In 1932, she headlined the hit Broadway play Life Begins, an episodic drama set in a hospital maternity ward, earning strong critical notices for her portrayal of Florette Darien, a chorus girl. Warner Bros. invited her to recreate the role in the studio's film adaptation that same year and signed her to a seven-year contract. During her first five years at the studio she appeared in more than thirty films, among them the Academy Award-nominated I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) with Paul Muni and Frank Capra's Lady for a Day (1933), as well as Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), Girl Missing (1933), the musical Go into Your Dance (1935), Little Big Shot (1935), Nobody's Fool (1936), and High Tension (1936).

Throughout the early 1930s, Farrell was frequently paired with fellow Warner Bros. actress Joan Blondell as a comedy duo, appearing together in five films: Havana Widows (1933), Kansas City Princess (1934), Traveling Saleslady (1935), We're in the Money (1935), and Miss Pacific Fleet (1935). The two appeared together in nine films in total. Beginning in 1937, Farrell took on the role of Torchy Blane, a fast-talking newspaper reporter, in a series of Warner Bros. films adapted from detective novelist Frederick Nebel's MacBride and Kennedy stories. The first entry, Smart Blonde (1937), co-starring Barton MacLane as detective Steve McBride, was a surprise hit, and Farrell continued in the role for seven films opposite MacLane through 1939. In preparing the character, she studied real-life female journalists, describing her approach in a 1969 Time interview as an effort to create a true human being rather than an exaggerated comedy type. Alongside the Torchy series, she appeared in Dance Charlie Dance (1937), Exposed (1938), and Prison Break (1938), and performed in the radio series Vanity, Playhouse, and Manhattan Latin with Humphrey Bogart. In 1937 she was elected honorary mayor of North Hollywood, defeating Bing Crosby and Lewis Stone by a three-to-one margin, and took an active role in the position by attending civic functions and supporting infrastructure projects.

Farrell departed Warner Bros. in 1939 when her contract expired, citing the studio's typecasting of her as a newspaper reporter, a pay raise that Jack Warner had reneged on, and her desire to return to the stage. She told syndicated columnist Bob Thomas in 1952 that theatre offered a more satisfying immediacy of audience response and a greater sense of ownership over her performance. In July 1939 she starred in Anna Christie at the Westport Country Playhouse, followed by a summer stock production of S. N. Behrman's Brief Moment. She then co-starred with Lyle Talbot and Alan Dinehart in Separate Rooms at Broadway's Plymouth Theater, a production that ran for 613 performances throughout 1940 and 1941. Her subsequent Broadway appearances included The Overtons in 1945, Home is the Hero by Walter Macken in 1954, and the play Masquerade. She also starred in Forty Carats, extending her Broadway presence through 1968.

On television, Farrell won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in 1963 for her performance as Martha Morrison in the medical drama series Ben Casey. Her Broadway career, which had begun in 1929, continued through 1968, encompassing productions that included Recapture, Separate Rooms, Masquerade, and Forty Carats, among others. Farrell died on May 1, 1971.