Mayo Methot

Mayo Jane Methot was born on March 3, 1904, in Chicago, Illinois, the only child of Beryl Evelyn (née Wood) and John Dillon Methot, a ship captain. She was a direct descendant of Zachary Taylor, the twelfth President of the United States. Shortly after her birth, the family settled in Portland, Oregon, where Methot would spend her formative years. She demonstrated an early aptitude for performance, memorizing passages from Romeo and Juliet as a young child and making her professional stage debut at age five in a Portland production of Sapho, playing the role of Josef opposite Florence Roberts.

By 1912, the eight-year-old Methot was performing the role of David, a young boy, in The Awakening of Helena Richie at the Grand Opera House in Salem, Oregon. Press coverage of the production noted her unusual grasp of dramatic requirements during rehearsals, and she cited French actress Sarah Bernhardt as her primary inspiration. Around this period she was selected to travel with Portland delegates to Washington, D.C., where she presented President Woodrow Wilson with a bouquet of flowers. Methot began working with the Portland-based Baker Stock Company at age nine, earning the nickname "The Portland Rosebud" through her frequent appearances in local theater. In 1914 she made her film debut in the serial short Forgotten Songs, produced by the Portland-based American Lifeograph Studios alongside fellow Baker Stock Company players. She continued performing with the company through the early 1920s, taking lead roles in productions including The Littlest Rebel (1916), Come Out of the Kitchen (1919), Dawn o' the Mountains (1920), Parlor, Bedroom and Bath (1920), and That Girl Patsy (1921). Methot graduated from Miss Catlin's School in 1919 before committing fully to the Baker Stock Company.

During the summer of 1921, while appearing in locally produced serial short films for filmmaker Robert C. Bruce, Methot met cameraman and war veteran Jack Lamond. The two married on September 21, 1921, at Saint Luke's Episcopal Church in Vancouver, Washington. In November 1922, the couple relocated to New York City, where Lamond took a position at Cosmopolitan Productions. Methot and Lamond divorced on December 30, 1927, after she asserted that he had deserted her in 1925.

Methot's Broadway career began in the summer of 1923 with director William Brady's The Mad Honeymoon. Though the production received largely unfavorable reviews, Methot was notably the only cast member to escape critical censure. Her performance led directly to her being cast as the female lead Leola Lane in George M. Cohan's The Song and Dance Man, which opened on New Year's Eve 1923. She returned to Broadway in 1925 as Phyllis Halladay in Alias the Deacon, opposite Berton Churchill, followed by a 1927 staging of The Medicine Man at the New Cort Theatre in Queens, produced by Sam H. Harris.

In 1929 Methot appeared in a winter Broadway production of All the King's Men, playing Florence Wendell. Donald Mulhern of the Brooklyn Standard Union praised her handling of emotional scenes, writing that she made the character "very real." That same year she originated a role in the Vincent Youmans and Billy Rose musical Great Day, introducing the standard "More Than You Know" among other songs. Also in 1929, her performance as Hope Ferrier in Half Gods at the Plymouth Theatre drew further critical recognition, with Alvin Kayton of The Brooklyn Citizen calling her "extraordinarily capable" and doubting the role could have been bettered. Her Broadway appearances also included the plays What Ann Brought Home, The Song Writer, and Torch Song, among other productions spanning her stage career from 1923 to 1935.

Methot relocated to Hollywood in 1930 to pursue film work. Her first significant speaking role came in the United Artists gangster film Corsair in 1931. On November 28 of that year she married Percy T. Morgan, an oil tycoon and co-owner of the Cock 'n' Bull restaurant on Hollywood's Sunset Boulevard. After signing with Warner Bros. in 1932, she starred as the female lead in The Night Club Lady, a murder mystery co-starring Adolphe Menjou. A sustained run of supporting roles followed, typically portraying hard-edged or unsympathetic women in crime melodramas, including The Mind Reader and William Wyler's Counsellor at Law, both in 1933, and Jimmy the Gent in 1934, the latter opposite James Cagney and Bette Davis. Also in 1934 she appeared in three First National Pictures features: Registered Nurse, Side Streets, and Mills of the Gods. Smaller parts followed in The Case of the Curious Bride and Dr. Socrates, both released in 1935. Methot divorced Percy Morgan in February 1937, citing his refusal to allow her to accept an acting role in New York City.

Her final significant film credit came with the 1937 crime drama Marked Woman, in which she again appeared alongside Davis and Humphrey Bogart. Methot and Bogart became romantically involved during the production and married on August 28, 1938, in Beverly Hills. Two years into the marriage, Methot gave up acting. The union was turbulent; Methot struggled with severe alcoholism and was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia following a suicide attempt in 1943. After numerous reconciliations, she and Bogart divorced in 1945. Unable to reestablish her film career, Methot returned to Portland, where her alcoholism and depression intensified. She died on June 9, 1951, at the age of 47, from complications stemming from alcoholism. Over the course of her career she appeared in more than thirty films in addition to her extensive stage work.