Margaret Sullavan

Margaret Brooke Sullavan was an American stage and film actress born on May 16, 1909, in Norfolk, Virginia, to Cornelius Sullavan, a wealthy stockbroker, and his wife, Garland Councill Sullavan. She had a younger brother, Cornelius, and a half-sister, Louise "Weedie" Gregory. During her early childhood, a painful muscular weakness in her legs prevented her from walking and kept her isolated from other children until the age of six. After her recovery she became an adventurous child who preferred the company of children from poorer neighborhoods, a habit her class-conscious parents discouraged. Her first performance experience came through dance recitals at St. Andrew's Episcopal Church. She attended Chatham Episcopal Institute in Chatham, Virginia, where she served as student body president and delivered the salutatory oration in 1927. She later moved to Boston to live with her half-sister Weedie, studying dance at the Boston Denishawn studio and drama at the Copley Theatre against her parents' wishes. When they reduced her allowance, she supported herself by working as a clerk at the Harvard Cooperative Bookstore in Cambridge.

Sullavan's professional career began in 1929 when she secured a chorus part in the Harvard Dramatic Society's spring production Close Up, a musical written by Harvard senior Bernard Hanighen. The production's president, Charles Leatherbee, and Bretaigne Windust, president of Princeton's Theatre Intime, had co-founded the University Players on Cape Cod and persuaded Sullavan to join their second summer season. That summer she made her professional stage debut opposite Henry Fonda in The Devil in the Cheese. She returned for most of the University Players' 1930 season and rejoined the company for the majority of their 18-week winter season in Baltimore in 1930–31. Her parents attended a production of Preston Sturges's Strictly Dishonorable in 1930, in which Sullavan played the lead, and confronted with her evident talent, they withdrew their objections to her career. A Shubert scout also saw her in that production, leading eventually to a meeting with Lee Shubert himself. Shubert was struck by the husky quality of her voice, which Sullavan later joked she had cultivated from a bout of laryngitis into a permanent hoarseness by standing in every available draft.

Sullavan made her Broadway debut on May 20, 1931, in A Modern Virgin, a comedy by Elmer Harris, and began touring the production on August 3. In 1932, she appeared in four consecutive Broadway productions — If Love Were All, Happy Landing, Chrysalis, and Bad Manners — all of which were commercial failures, though critics praised her performances in each. In March 1933, she stepped into a role in Dinner at Eight in New York, where film director John M. Stahl saw her and determined she was right for his planned picture Only Yesterday. Her Broadway career extended from 1926 to 1955 and included productions such as Janus, Sabrina Fair, The Deep Blue Sea, and Dinner at Eight, among others. Her stage portrayals of Terry Randall in Stage Door, Sally Middleton in The Voice of the Turtle, and Sabrina Fairchild in Sabrina Fair were among her most recognized work on the stage.

Before accepting Stahl's offer, Sullavan had already declined five-year contracts from Paramount and Columbia. She accepted a three-year, two-pictures-per-year contract from Universal Pictures at $1,200 per week, with a clause permitting her to return to the stage periodically. She arrived in Hollywood on May 16, 1933, her 24th birthday, and made her screen debut that year in Only Yesterday. When she viewed the film's early rushes, she attempted to buy out her contract for $2,500, but Universal refused. Critic Richard Watts Jr., writing in The New York Herald Tribune on November 10, 1933, described her performance as marked by "forthright sympathy, wise reticence and honest feeling." Her next film, Little Man, What Now? (1934), depicted a couple struggling in impoverished post–World War I Germany, and Sullavan counted it among the few Hollywood roles that gave her genuine satisfaction. During production of The Good Fairy (1935), she married its director, William Wyler. She had previously been married to Henry Fonda from 1931 to 1933, and the two later appeared together in the comedy The Moon's Our Home (1936), playing a newly married couple.

Sullavan's seventh film, Three Comrades (1938), a drama set in post–World War I Germany, earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress and recognition as best actress of the year from the New York Film Critics Circle. She made four films opposite James Stewart, beginning with Next Time We Love (1936), for which she had campaigned to have Stewart cast as her leading man. Their collaborations also included The Shopworn Angel (1938) and The Shop Around the Corner, the latter of which became one of her best-known screen works. The Mortal Storm was another of the four films she made with Stewart. Sullavan made only 16 films in total, a reflection of her preference for stage work. In the early 1940s she stepped away from the screen to focus on her children and theatrical work. She returned to film in 1950 for No Sad Songs for Me, in which she played a woman dying of cancer, and that film marked the end of her screen career. For the remainder of her professional life, she worked exclusively on the stage. Sullavan died on January 1, 1960.