Julie Haydon

Julie Haydon, born Donella Donaldson on June 10, 1910, in Oak Park, Illinois, was an American actress whose career spanned Broadway, film, and television. The daughter of newspaper publisher Orin Donaldson and Ella Horton, she began her acting training at age 19 under Neely Dickson at the Hollywood Community Theater. Early stage work included a tour with Minnie Maddern Fiske in Mrs. Bumstead Leigh and a performance as Ophelia in Hamlet at the Hollywood Playhouse.

Haydon transitioned to film in 1931, making her screen debut in the MGM Western drama The Great Meadow under her birth name. A contract with RKO followed in 1932, and that year she appeared in The Conquerors, directed by William Wellman. Her most prominent film role came in 1935 when she received second billing opposite Noël Coward in The Scoundrel, a Ben Hecht–Charles MacArthur production. Among her subsequent films was A Family Affair (1937), the first entry in the Andy Hardy series. A disputed claim, held by Haydon among others, suggests she rather than Fay Wray provided the screams heard in the 1933 film King Kong. Her film career concluded in 1937.

Her Broadway debut came that same year, 1935, in Philip Barry's Bright Star, which closed after seven performances. Shadow and Substance by Paul Vincent Carroll followed in 1938, in which Haydon played a saintly maid through a nine-month run. In 1939 she originated the role of Kitty Duval, a prostitute, in William Saroyan's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Time of Your Life, and she returned to Saroyan's work in the 1942 Broadway production of Hello Out There. Her most celebrated stage credit came in 1945 when she created the role of Laura Wingfield in Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie. Her Broadway career also included the drama The Patriots, Miracle in the Mountains, and Our Lan', the last of which marked her final Broadway appearance in 1947.

Beginning in 1949, Haydon appeared on television in productions including Kraft Television Theater, Armstrong Circle Theater, The United States Steel Hour, and Robert Montgomery Presents. In 1955, at age 45, she married drama critic George Jean Nathan, who was 73 at the time of their marriage and died three years later. Haydon never remarried. Following Nathan's death she edited two collections of his writings and delivered lectures drawn from his books, also writing magazine articles about actors she had known professionally.

In the early 1960s she recorded two albums for Folkways Records: George Jean Nathan's The New American Credo in 1962 and Colette's Music Hall (L'Envers du Music-Hall): By Colette in 1963. That same year she left New York City and returned to the Midwest, spending a decade as actress in residence at the College of St. Teresa in Winona, Minnesota. During that period she took on the role of Amanda Wingfield in revivals of The Glass Menagerie, a role she reprised off-off-Broadway in 1980. She continued working as a drama coach and appeared in community theater and college productions throughout her later years.

Haydon died on December 24, 1994, in La Crosse, Wisconsin, of abdominal cancer at the age of 84. She was buried beside her husband at the Cemetery of the Gate of Heaven in Hawthorne, New York. A collection of Nathan-Haydon papers was donated to the La Crosse Public Library archives, and a collection of Nathan papers is held at Cornell University.