Regarding Rosalind Russell

Well, it was supposed to be funny. I’m old enough (alas) to remember the Oscar broadcast of 1959. Back in those days, the show’s musical numbers were not nearly as elaborate as they are today. At one point in the evening, three British actresses (one was Angela Lansbury) sang a little ditty about their countrywoman, Deborah Kerr, who was up for Best Actress for her starring role in Separate Tables. While praising Kerr, they took would-be witty potshots at her rivals for the honor. Regarding Rosalind Russell, they cattily opined that “Your mother could have scored with Auntie Mame.”     

 As a kid I realized full well that it’s not nice to compare a film star to somebody’s mother. Still, much as I loved Russell’s madcap performance as the wealthy, uninhibited, fundamentally good-hearted Mame, I definitely put Russell in the middle-aged category.  (She was over fifty at the time.) Years later, I was surprised to learn that before World War II she was a glamorous leading lady type, particularly in comedies. After portraying a conniving society dame in The Women (1939) she graduated to the leading role of Hildy Johnson, ace reporter and the object of Cary Grant’s affections in the wonderfully screwball His Girl Friday (1940). Her first Oscar nomination came for her portrayal of the savvy but lovelorn elder sister in 1942’S My Sister Eileen.  But later in the decade she was again up for the golden statuette for playing a heroic nun in Sister Kenny (1946) and a tragic heroine in the film version of Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra (1947 – not a lot of laughs in that one!).

 In the following decade, Russell was a natural to repeat her Broadway triumph in Auntie Mame. The film version, though overlong, has its own sparkle, as Mame ebulliently proceeds to adopt an orphan boy, a bashful Southern millionaire, and a woebegone unwed mother into her life. (The last of these plot lines is extraordinarily dated, but Peggy Cass is hilarious – and Oscar-nominated – as the addlepated Agnes Gooch.) 

 AS she moved into the 1960s, though, Hollywood didn’t seem quite clear on how to make use of her considerable talents. In 1961 she starred in the screen version of a hit stage comedy, A Majority of One. Broadway audiences had kvelled to the performance of Gertrude Berg (TV’s Molly Goldberg) as a rather stereotypical New York Jewish widow who—against all odds—falls for a Japanese widower (would you believe Sir Cedric Hardwicke?) despite the misgivings of her family. The idea is that Bertha Jacoby, who lost a son in the Pacific during World War II, has a strong distaste for anything Japanese, until she meets a Japanese gentleman with his own sorrows. Of course it’s meant to be a story of love and reconciliation, and audiences of the day found it heart-warming..

 I’m told that Russell herself wanted Berg to repeat her stage triumph, but bowed to  Jack Warner’s insistence that she step into the role. She played opposite Alec Guinness, a talented actor known for his chameleon-like transformations but hardly convincing as an Asian. So a play about the melding of Jewish and Japanese culture was played by two Roman Catholics with roots in the British Isles, in an era long before our current passion for political correctness. Ugh!

 In 1962, Russell took on another hit Broadway role, that of Mama Rose in Gypsy, but it was hardly a triumph, partly due to her limited skill as a singer. She ended her career playing funny nuns in two The Trouble with Angels films.