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| Birth Name(s) : Jean Arthur |
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Full Jean Arthur Biography
Arthur is probably best known as the heroine in three Frank Capra films: Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, You Can't Take It With You, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
Arthur was born Gladys Georgianna Greene in Plattsburgh, New York to Johanna Augusta Nelson and Hubert Sidney Greene. She lived off and on in Westbrook, Maine from 1908 to 1915 while her father worked at Lamson Studios in Portland, Maine as a photographer. The product of a nomadic childhood, Arthur also lived at times in Jacksonville, Florida; Schenectady, New York; and, during a portion of her high school years, in the Washington Heights neighborhood of upper Manhattan. She came from a family of three older brothers. Her maternal grandparents were immigrants from Norway who settled in the American West. She reputedly took her stage name from two of her greatest heroes, Joan of Arc (Jeanne d'Arc) and King Arthur.
Presaging many of her later film roles, she worked as a stenographer on Bond Street in lower Manhattan during World War I.
Arthur "retired" when her contract with Columbia Pictures expired in 1944. She reportedly ran through the studio's streets, shouting "I'm free, I'm free!" For the next several years, she turned down virtually all film offers, the two exceptions being Billy Wilder's A Foreign Affair (1948), in which she played a congresswoman and rival of Marlene Dietrich, and as a homesteader's wife in the classic Western Shane (1953), which turned out to be the biggest box-office hit of her career. The latter was her final film.
Arthur's post-retirement work in theater was intermittent, somewhat curtailed by her longstanding shyness and discomfort about her chosen profession. Capra claimed she vomited in her dressing room between scenes, yet emerged each time to perform a flawless take. According to John Oller's biography Jean Arthur: The Actress Nobody Knew (1997), Arthur developed a kind of stage fright punctuated with bouts of psychosomatic illnesses. A prime example was in 1945, when she was cast in the lead of the Garson Kanin play Born Yesterday. Her nerves and insecurity got the better of her and she left the production before it reached Broadway, opening the door for Judy Holliday to take the part.
Arthur did score a major triumph on Broadway in 1950, starring in a stage revival of Peter Pan playing the Eternal Boy when she was almost 50. She tackled the role of her namesake, Joan of Arc, in a 1954 stage production of George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan, but she left the play after a nervous breakdown and battles with director Harold Clurman.
In 1966, the extremely reclusive Arthur tentatively returned to show business as an attorney on a TV sitcom, The Jean Arthur Show, which was cancelled mid-season by CBS after only 11 episodes.
Arthur next decided to teach drama, first at Vassar College and then the North Carolina School of the Arts. While living in North Carolina she made front page news by being arrested and tossed in jail for trespassing on a neighbor's property to console a dog she felt was being mistreated. An animal lover her entire life, Arthur said she trusted them more than people.
She turned down the role of the lady missionary in Lost Horizon (1973), the unsuccessful musical remake of the 1937 film of the same name. At the Yale Law School Film Society weekend with Capra in 1972, she attended a small afternoon symposium at his invitation. He urged her to stay for the screening that night, and assured her the audience would be delighted and overwhelmingly enthusiastic. She declined because, she said, she had to go home and feed her cats.
In 1975, the Broadway hit play First Monday in October, about the first female Supreme Court justice, was written especially with Arthur in mind, but once again, she succumbed to extreme stage fright and quit the production shortly into its out-of-town run in Cleveland. She then retired for good, retreating to her ocean home in Carmel, California, steadfastly refusing interviews until her resistance was broken down by the author of a book on her one-time director Capra (she once famously said that she’d rather have her throat slit than do an interview).
Jean Arthur died from heart failure at the age of 90. Her ashes were scattered at sea near Carmel-by-the-Sea, California. She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6331 Hollywood Blvd. The Jean Arthur Atrium was her gift to the Monterey Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California.
To at least one teenager in a small town (though I’m sure we were a multitude), Jean Arthur suggested strongly that the ideal woman could be — ought to be — judged by her spirit as well as her beauty…. The notion of the woman as a friend and confidante, as well as someone you courted and were nuts about, someone whose true beauty was internal rather than external, became a full-blown possibility as we watched Jean Arthur.
In January 2007, Turner Classic Movies aired a 17-film tribute to Jean Arthur calling her "the quintessential comedic leading lady." |
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