Madeleine Carroll

[will.15]

Given how good an actress she became - I was shocked at how bad she was in the almost unwatchable "Atlantic" (1929) - but I guess hardly anyone put in a decent performance in this primitive early British talkie. Her delivery was even slower than that of poor old John Longden - thank goodness they managed to redeem themselves later on in their careers!

A lot of good actors were bad in early talkies. Douglas Fairbanks Jr. is very stilted and actorish in Little Caesar, but is very natural and effective in Prisoner of Zenda just six years later.

[penfold]

It was partly down to the limits of the nascent technology, partly to sound recordists being scared of any extraneous noise, and partly fear (on the actors part) that their careers might be finished if it all sounded strange - and the technology att that stage did distort slightly.

When the technology developed, the techniques improved, everybody relaxed.......

[CaptainWaggett]

From the Oxford DNB

Carroll, Madeleine [real name Marie-Madeleine Bernadette O'Carroll] (1906–1987), actress

by David Parkinson

© Oxford University Press 2004–9 All rights reserved



Carroll, Madeleine [real name Marie-Madeleine Bernadette O'Carroll] (1906–1987), actress, was born on 26 February 1906 in West Bromwich, Warwickshire, one of at least two daughters of John O'Carroll, an Irish professor of philology, and his French wife, Hélène de Rosière Tuaillon. Brought up in France until she was eleven, she followed her father to the University of Birmingham, where she began acting in a dramatic society production of Selma. Defying her father's wishes she abandoned her MA course in Paris and, having briefly taught French at a Hove girls' school, made her stage début in Cyril Campion's The Lash at the Winter Gardens, New Brighton, in 1927.



Carroll's success in Sir Seymour Hicks's West End hit Mr What's His Name (1927) began a run of ten plays in four years, including Margaret Kennedy's and Basil Dean's The Constant Nymph (1928), Reginald Berkeley's French Leave (1930), and John Van Druten's After All (1931). Her screen career also blossomed from its unprepossessing start in The Guns of Loos (1928). She made L'Instinct (1928) for Franco Films in Nice before making her talkie bow in The American Prisoner and finding fame in Young Woodley (both 1930).



On her marriage to guards officer Philip Astley in 1931 Carroll announced her retirement. However, she was lured back to films by Gaumont with a reported £650-a-week contract and showy leads in Sleeping Car and I was a Spy (both 1933). She even ventured to Hollywood to make The World Moves On (1934) for John Ford. Such was her celebrity that she inspired a character in A. G. Macdonnell's novel, England, their England (1933):

the loveliness of Esmeralda d'Avenant was an inspiration to millions. Theatre-goers adored her at Daly's, the Winter Garden, Drury Lane. Film fans worshipped her from Pole to Pole. She had the most famous smile and the best publicity man in the English-speaking world, and her legs, which, though excellently shaped, were not more noticeably alluring than the legs of many a humble shopgirl or typist, were always insured for ten per cent more than Mistinguett's. (A. G. Macdonnell, England, their England, Penguin edn, 1933, 56)

It was Carroll's association with Alfred Hitchcock that transformed her fortunes. Ironically, she landed a leading part in The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935) only because Jane Baxter withdrew, but Hitchcock was sufficiently impressed to build up her role, having her famously remove her wet stockings while handcuffed to the fugitive Robert Donat. She was ‘precisely the type of cool, prim blonde whom Alfred Hitchcock enjoyed humiliating on screen’ (The Independent). Consequently he cast her opposite John Gielgud in Secret Agent (1936). But it proved to be her last British assignment before Walter Wanger signed her to Twentieth Century Fox. ‘Mr Wanger does not visualise a future for me as a second Dietrich; another Garbo or Hepburn; or a star in the Colbert class’, she confessed in an interview before her departure. ‘I am grateful to him for that, because I have always abhorred imitation’ (Film Weekly, 30 May 1936). However, cutting an original figure proved difficult to achieve.



Carroll was billed as ‘the most beautiful woman in the world’ for The Case Against Mrs Ames (1936), but she was soon being contracted out to co-star with Ronald Colman in The Prisoner of Zenda and Gary Cooper in The General Died at Dawn (both 1937). In the following year, she was voted ‘The girl most liked to be cast on a desert island with’ in a student poll—to which she responded, ‘I'm very flattered, but if I'm ever cast away, I hope the man is a good obstetrician’ (Rode). But despite her status among Hollywood's top female earners, the critics had begun to turn. Graham Greene was particularly vitriolic in his review of On the Avenue (1937):

she has what must be, to all but the most blindly devoted keepers, the less endearing traits of a young elephant. We expect to see the sets rock a little beneath her stupendous coquettery … Handsome in a big way, given to intense proboscine whistling, she lends an impression of weight to every action, of awful fidelities to the lightest love. (Night and Day, 29 July 1937)

Carroll moved to Paramount in mid-1938, hoping to make ‘important films, promoting world peace’ (Rode). But she was increasingly relegated to minor works, enduring six assignments with journeyman director Edward H. Griffith. In two of these the co-star was Sterling Hayden (1916–1986), who became her second husband in 1942 (she and Astley had divorced in 1939). Following My Son, My Son (1940) and My Favourite Blonde (1942), Carroll began to devote her energies to war work. Her sister, Marguerite, had been killed in the blitz in 1943 and Carroll, now an American citizen, went to France under the name of Hamilton to serve with the Allied Relief Fund and the American Red Cross. In addition to entertaining the troops, she also cared for 150 orphans in a château near Paris. She received the US medal of freedom and was appointed to the French Légion d'honneur for her efforts.



In 1945 Carroll was again divorced, and the next year she married her third husband, former French resistance leader Henri Lavorel. That marriage, too, ended in divorce, in 1949. She struggled to relaunch her career, before finally retiring from films after Lady Windermere's Fan (1949). She made occasional television appearances in the 1950s, and attempted a stage comeback in Beekman Place (1964). A fourth marriage in 1950, to Life Magazine publisher Andrew Heiskell, survived until dissolution in 1965. Thereafter, Carroll concentrated on running her French fruit farm and her charitable activities. However, the death of her only child, Anne-Madeleine, in 1984, drove her into seclusion in Marbella, Spain, where she died on 3 October 1987.



DAVID PARKINSON

Sources J. Vinson, ed., The international directory of films and film-makers (1986) · D. Rode, Film Fan Monthly (Sept 1974) · The Independent (5 Oct 1987) · Daily Telegraph (5 Oct 1987) · The Times (6 Oct 1987) · New York Times (31 Oct 1987) · Film Dope (Oct 1974) · Film Weekly (12 April 1930) · Film Weekly (23 May 1936) · Film Weekly (30 May 1936) · The Guardian (5 Oct 1987) · Sunday Express (10 June 1984) · Films and Filming (Oct 1971) · D. Parkinson, ed., Mornings in the dark: the Graham Greene film reader (1993)



Likenesses photographs, Ronald Grant Archive, London · photographs, Kobal collection, London · photographs, Huntley Archive, London







--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

© Oxford University Press 2004–9 All rights reserved



David Parkinson, ‘Carroll, Madeleine (1906–1987)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/57305, accessed 30 Sept 2009]



Madeleine Carroll (1906–1987): doi:10.1093/refdnb/57305

[Ray]

She is excellent in The Fan, the adaption of Oscar Wilde's Lady Windemere's Fan. Jeanne Crain got top billing, but there is some great support from George Sanders and Martita Hunt.

[image45]

How many of her films can you get? I have often tried to find 'Sleeping Car' from 1933 that also Stars Ivor Novello. Much of her early work is hard to see I have found!