JamesM

One of the greats who starred in films of Frank Capra, Harold Lloyd, William Wyler, William A. Wellman, Irving Cummings, Howard Hawks and others in the US in 1930s before coming to work in England where she starred in 'Blithe Spirirt' for David Lean and worked for Charles Crichton, Terence Fisher, Alexander Mackendrick, Charles Frend, Joseph Losey and others.

MrDrakesDuck

Wow, had no idea she was with us so long.

Always enjoy watching her in <span style="color:#3333FF">The Foreman Went to France</span>, <span style="color:#FF0000">Blithe Spirit </span>& <span style="color:#33CC00">Battle of the Sexes</span>. [img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/clapping.gif[/img]

"I thought I had to shoot Germans, not chew 'em"

Malcolm

From "The Daily Telegrath" 25 November2005
Constance Cummings


Constance Cummings, the American-born actress who died on Wednesday aged 95, remained at the top of her profession on both sides of the Atlantic for more than half a century.

As beautiful as she was intelligent, she had the rare gift of being able to act in films and plays with equal grace and authority. In later years, her appearances on television included series such as The Power Game, Craig's Wife, and Rodney Ackland's play, The Old Ladies.

Having been a Hollywood film star in the 1930s, and having won a fine reputation in the comedies of her English husband, the producer-playwright Benn W Levy (who became an MP after the Second World War), she played increasingly serious-minded roles in middle age, and triumphed in two modern tragedies: Long Day's Journey Into Night, opposite Laurence Olivier, and Wings, a solo performance, at the National Theatre in the 1970s.

When the critic James Agate first saw her on the stage in 1936 he proclaimed her "an incontestably fine emotional actress, up to anything from pitch-and-toss to manslaughter". Her dramatic range grew wider with the years, and in the 1960s she began to play less immediately sympathetic roles in plays by Jean-Paul Sartre, Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams and Friedrich Durrenmatt. These were followed by a three-year spell at the National Theatre in Shakespeare, O'Neill, Chekhov and Euripides, in which her long-celebrated radiance and charming personality took second place to the interpretation of character.

Reflecting on her career, in which she started as a Broadway chorus girl and starred with Mae West and Harold Lloyd in Hollywood before herself becoming one of its bright, particular darlings, Constance Cummings observed: "When I look back on those old films I don't feel it is a different person up there on the screen at all. It's still me. I suppose in a way you always remain young inside."

Born in Seattle, Washington, on May 15 1910, Constance Cummings was a lawyer's daughter. She wanted to be a classical dancer. After a walk-on part as a prostitute in summer stock at the age of 16, she joined a Broadway chorus line ("you should have seen those high kicks of mine") and caught the eye of Hollywood's Sam Goldwyn.

He wanted to see her in a film opposite Ronald Colman, then changed his mind. Colman, taking pity, persuaded an agent to find her work and her first film, The Criminal Code, with Walter Huston, was a success.

It was one of 14 American films which she made over the course of two years; the most notable was perhaps Movie Crazy with Harold Lloyd. When she tried to make a film in England she had to fight a lawsuit with Columbia Pictures, which she won.

By then she was one of the most sought-after film stars on either side of the Atlantic, with her tawny gold curls, jolly English laugh, grey-blue eyes and freckles and unfashionable disdain for face powder or make-up.

While in Hollywood she met the London playwright Benn Levy on a stint as a scriptwriter; they married in 1933. Their honeymoon in Venice was cut short by the best offer (£4,000 a film) she had ever received, which would also permit her to film in England.

When, in 1934, she came to London to appear in the try-out of an American marital comedy, Sour Grapes, the headline of this paper's notice of it by WA Darlington was: "Film Star Who Can Act". It moved swiftly into the West End.

It was in the title role of one of her husband's adaptations, Young Madame Conti (Savoy, 1936), that her acting convinced James Agate that she had made "a roaring success out of what in other hands might so easily have been an inarticulate, elegant flop".

Before the end of that year, she was playing the title role in another Levy adaptation, Emma Bovary, which was followed by her New York appearance as Nellie Blunt in another of his collaborations, If I Were You.

Back in London in 1938 as Katherine in Goodbye, Mr Chips (Shaftesbury) her playing struck Agate as having "some of the fragrance and pathos, sensitiveness and radiance of the great actresses of our youth. What I want to know is where Miss Cummings has found the model for acting at once so uncommon and so little common."

After another Levy piece, The Jealous God, in the West End, she joined the Old Vic Company at the Buxton Festival when the war broake out to play Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, Miss Richland in Goldsmith's Good-Natured Man and the lead in Shaw's Saint Joan.

Before being cast as Joan, she was interviewed by the playwright. Characteristically, she questioned him first: "How can you tell I would be any good as Joan if you haven't ever seen me on the stage?" "I can tell, child," he replied, "I can tell."

Both her Juliet and her Joan were praised for their emotional intensity. During the war she acted in half a dozen plays for the troops as well as in West End productions such as Sky Lark (Duchess, 1942) and The Petrified Forest (Globe, 1942).

Then, in 1945, she starred with Rex Harrison in David Lean's film of Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit.

For some 15 years after her return in 1946 to the London theatre in Clutterbuck (Wyndham's), one of her husband's typically amiable comedies, she remained the elegant, attractive actress with the slight American accent whose emotional powers gave depth to the thinnest stuff.

In Don't Listen Ladies (St James's), Before The Party (St Martin's) and another of her husband's pieces, Return to Tyassi (Duke of York's), she was more or less her charming self. In Winter Journey (St James's), however, a change of dramatic gear was plain when she took over as the worried wife of an alcoholic actor on his uppers, played by Michael Redgrave, and in her acting in the American play The Shrike (Prince's). Then, in 1957, at the Oxford Playhouse, when she performed well as Lysistrata, Frank Hauser realised that she could be a finer actress if she could bring herself to act outside her usual range.

Meanwhile, she was Antiope in The Rape of the Belt (Piccadilly), a flippant derivation (again by her husband) of a Greek myth which transferred to New York, like so much of her work.

After Archibald MacLeish's JB (Phoenix), she succumbed to Hauser's idea of her playing, against type, the sadistic lesbian in Sartre's Huis Clos. Inez was ugly and vulgar, but the usually lovely Cummings admitted with a mild shock: "I found bits of that woman in myself."

An equal challenge arose from Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Piccadilly, 1964) when the American originals left the company, and she and Ray MacAnally took over as the embattled pair of alcoholics. Their success was unquestioned.

After being teamed with Joan Greenwood as a more frivolous fellow-tippler in Coward's Fallen Angels, seriousness set in again as Gertrude to Nicol Williamson's Hamlet (Round House, 1969).

If there were no meaty parts for her in London she would go to the provinces - Mrs Goforth, for example, in The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Any More by Tennessee Williams (Glasgow Citizens, 1969), and Claire in The Visit by Friedrich Durrenmatt (Belgrade, Coventry, 1970) gave her the chances she sought.

Then, at the National Theatre under Olivier's regime, came Volumnia in the Brechtian Coriolanus, Leda in Amphitryon 38, and - the big surprise - Mary Tyrone in Michael Blakemore's masterly production of O'Neill's autobiographical drama, Long Day's Journey Into Night (1971).

It was a surprise not only because of her power to sustain such a challenging role, but also because she bridged the gap between the gentle, motherly woman who has apparently found a cure for her drug addiction and the closing scenes in which she tragically has not. Cummings here matched Olivier in theatrical power and surpassed him in pity.

Her Ranevsky in Blakemore's revival of The Cherry Orchard, and her Agave in the Wole Soyinka version of The Bacchae at the same theatre proved her integrity in avoiding the soft option.

Further proof came at Guildford in Maugham's The Circle, and at the Royal Court in Shaw's Mrs Warren's Profession, but particularly in Arthur Kopit's study of a woman fighting to regain sanity after a stroke in Wings (National Theatre, 1978).

When Benn Levy died in 1973, Constance Cummings continued to run their dairy farm of 600 acres in Oxfordshire. She also continued to act, appearing on stage and on radio. In her 90th year she was touring in Uncle Vanya.

Constance Cummings was appointed CBE in 1974. She served on committees for the Arts Council and the Royal Court Theatre.

Her son and daughter survive her.

smudge

Hear, hear !

Respect

SMUDGE

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