Mildred Shay

Mildred Helen Shay (September 26, 1911 – October 15, 2005) was an American actress whose career spanned stage, screen, and television across several decades. Standing five feet tall, she was nicknamed "Hollywood's Pocket Venus" by gossip columnist Walter Winchell, and her marriages, romances, and social life made her a recurring subject for Hollywood columnists throughout the 1930s.

Shay was born in Cedarhurst, New York, the eldest child of Joseph A. Shay, a wealthy lawyer, and his wife Lillian. She and her younger sister Adeline attended schools in New York before their father relocated the family to London when Shay was fourteen, following her earlier education at a Swiss finishing school in France. The family maintained residences in Florence and in Nice. When Shay was nineteen, her father's professional work on behalf of film studios brought the family to Hollywood, where they lived at the Garden of Allah apartments alongside neighbors that included Laurence Olivier, Harpo Marx, Gary Cooper, and Ginger Rogers.

Her entry into the film industry came through her father's connections with the heads of Fox and Paramount, which led to a screen test with Douglas Fairbanks Jr. She subsequently studied acting with Josephine Dillon, who was at the time married to Clark Gable. Her earliest screen appearances were uncredited roles in The Age of Consent (1932), A Bill of Divorcement (1932) with John Barrymore and Billie Burke, and Roman Scandals (1933) with Eddie Cantor. She also dubbed the voice of Greta Garbo in Grand Hotel.

Shay stepped away from acting during her first two marriages. Her first marriage, to Thomas Francis Murphy in 1934, ended within the year. She married again in 1936, to Winthrop Gardiner, a member of a prominent New York family descended from Lord Lion Gardiner, but filed for divorce after six months following Gardiner's publicized affair with ice skater Sonja Henie, whom he later married. It was after this second marriage ended that Shay appeared on Broadway in 1936 in The Sap Runs High. She then returned to Hollywood in 1939 to play Joan Crawford's French maid in The Women, a role that was noted as scene-stealing. Groucho Marx, a friend of Shay's, told her he believed she had a gift for comedy and offered to write material for her, but she declined, preferring to be regarded as a serious actress.

In 1940, Shay met British army captain Geoffrey Steele, and the two married in 1941. Press speculation at the time centered on how brief the union would be; Shay later recalled that no one gave the marriage more than three to six months. The couple remained together until Steele's death in 1987. During World War II, Shay moved to England with Steele, where their daughter Georgiana was born. She became a prominent figure in London society over the following decades and frequented Buckingham Palace.

Apart from the 1948 film I Killed the Count, Shay largely withdrew from acting for roughly two decades following her move to England. She resumed her screen career in 1968 with a small role in the Julie Andrews film Star! and appeared in the 1974 remake of The Great Gatsby. In 1976, director Ken Russell cast her in Valentino, his biographical film about Rudolph Valentino, in a role he described as an aged American desperate for attention; the part gave Shay the opportunity to dance with the film's star, Rudolf Nureyev. She continued to take roles over the following three decades, with appearances in Candleshoe (1977), Superman III (1983), Death Wish 3 (1985), Little Shop of Horrors (1986), and Bullseye! (1990). Her final film credit was Parting Shots in 1999.

Beyond her professional work, Shay was widely covered for her social life. She was transported around Hollywood in a Mercedes-Benz limousine, and her circle of acquaintances and reported romantic interests included Errol Flynn, Howard Hughes, Johnny Weissmuller, Victor Mature, Roy Rogers, and Cecil B. DeMille. Shay suffered a stroke in 2004, and her final public appearance was the National Film Theatre's tribute that year to director George Cukor. She died at the age of 94 in California while visiting her daughter, Georgiana Waller, the former wife of musician Gordon Waller.