Marjorie Rambeau
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Marjorie Rambeau (July 15, 1889 – July 6, 1970) was an American film and stage actress.
Early life
Rambeau was born in San Francisco, California. She began performing on the stage at the age of 12.
Career
In her youth she was a Broadway leading lady. In 1921, Dorothy Parker memorialized her in verse:
If all the tears you shed so lavishly / Were gathered, as they left each brimming eye. / And were collected in a crystal sea, / The envious ocean would curl up and dry— / So awful in its mightiness, that lake, / So fathomless, that clear and salty deep. / For, oh, it seems your gentle heart must break, / To see you weep. ...
Her few silent film roles such as Mary Moreland, The Dazzling Miss Davison, The Mirror, The Debt, Motherhood and The Greater Woman (all in 1917) were not major successes. By the time talkies came along she was in her early forties and she began to take on character roles in films such as Min and Bill, The Secret Six, Laughing Sinners, Grand Canary, Palooka, and Primrose Path, for which she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.
In 1940, Rambeau had the title role in Tugboat Annie Sails Again as well as second billing under Wallace Beery (the co-star of the original Tugboat Annie) in 20 Mule Team. Other films included Tobacco Road, A Man Called Peter, A View from Pompey's Head, Broadway and Slander. In 1953, she was again nominated for an Oscar, this time for Torch Song. In 1957, she appeared in a supporting role in Man of a Thousand Faces about the life of Lon Chaney, though she had never worked with the real Chaney in silent films.
For her contribution to the motion picture industry, Rambeau has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6336 Hollywood Blvd.
Private life
Rambeau was married three times but never had children:
- The first was in 1913 to Canadian writer, actor, and director Willard Mack. They divorced in 1917.
- She then married another actor, Hugh Dillman, in 1919. They divorced in 1923. Hugh Dillman married Anna Thompson Dodge, widow of automobile magnate Horace Elgin Dodge, Sr. and one of the wealthiest women in the world.
- Rambeau's last marriage was to Francis Gudger in 1931, with whom she remained until his death in 1967.
