Ann Harding

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Ann Harding ; actually Dorothy Walton Gatley (born August 7, 1902 in Fort Sam Houston , Texas , † September 1, 1981 in Sherman Oaks , California ), was an American actress who became a Hollywood star in the early talkies, mainly through melodramas .

Life

The daughter of a senior military man spent her childhood and adolescence on various US military bases. Contrary to her father's express wishes, Ann Harding decided to pursue a career as an actress. Her greatest success on Broadway was in the 1927 crime drama The Trial of Mary Dugan . Ann Harding went to Hollywood in early 1929 , but the hope of being able to play the leading role in the film adaptation of the play by MGM was dashed the moment Norma Shearer decided to make her official debut in the role of the suspected murdered chorus girls To give sound film. Harding then signed a contract with the Pathé company and achieved great financial and artistic success with her first film role, the adaptation of Philip Barry's salon comedy Paris Bound .

The studio used Harding immediately afterwards in Holiday and thus again in the adaptation of a Barry piece. The production brought Ann Harding in 1930 the only nomination for an Oscar for best actress. The play is remembered by most fans today in the film adaptation of George Cukor's The Sister of the Bride from 1938 with Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant . At the time, Harding was one of the biggest stars of their home studio Pathé, along with actresses Constance Bennett and Helen Twelvetrees . She retained her status as queen of the studio after Pathé merged with other companies to form RKO Pictures a short time later . From the start, Harding's career suffered from what is known as type casting : the endless repetition of the same role. After the actress had great success at the box office as a cultured, long-suffering lady of better society, she decided not to change the recipe for success. The spectrum of roles ranged from old-fashioned melodramas such as East Lynne or Devotion to triangular stories against an exotic studio background such as Escape from Devil's Island , who appointed Harding as the wife of a prison warden in French Guiana , and Prestige , with Ann as the wife of a plantation operator somewhere in Indochina and The Conquerors , where Harding survived the turmoil of the great American conquest at the end of the 19th century as the long-suffering wife of Richard Dix under the direction of William A. Wellman and received a total of $ 93,500 from the studio for her efforts. Her flair for sophisticated comedy - a word creation for which there is no appropriate German equivalent - was rarely used, for example in the 1932 film adaptation of the play The Animal Kingdom , again by Philip Barry, with Leslie Howard and Myrna Loy . In 1933, Ann Harding was seen again as a resigned lady of high society, who hides her heart under layers of fur, when she played the kind-hearted wife of a publisher who begins an affair with Myrna Loy in the film adaptation of the Broadway hit When Ladies Meet . Later that year, she starred opposite William Powell in the crime comedy Double Harness .

After 1933, however, Harding decided to only play in tearful melodramas. The stories were all similar: the heroine falls in love with the wrong man, becomes pregnant without being married, a murder happens somewhere, Ann takes the blame for incomprehensible reasons, goes innocently to prison, suffers a lot, still cries more and at the end there is a happy ending. The suffering happens with the greatest possible amount of glamor and no matter how mercilessly fate strikes, the heroine is always perfectly made up. The culmination of this world pain romance was formed by two films from 1934: The Life of Vergie Winters , in the course of which Harding accidentally becomes pregnant, renounces her child and in the end even goes to prison in favor of the child's father for a murder she did not commit . Gallant Lady used Harding again as an unmarried mother, who only after many strokes of fate can hold her child in her arms again after the father gave it up for adoption without her knowledge. The film became such a success that less than four years later the studio re-filmed the story with Barbara Stanwyck under the title Always Goodbye .

After the failure of Enchanted April and the demanding but financially disappointing adaptation of Peter Ibbetson with film partner Gary Cooper , both in 1935, Harding's career quickly sank into insignificance. She shot in England in 1937 on the side of Basil Rathbone Love From A Stranger , which is based on the play of the same name by Agatha Christie and then withdrew from the screen for a few years. It wasn't until 1942 that she returned to Hollywood as a character actress in Eyes in the Night . She then took on several other larger roles, such as Marjorie Merriweather Post , the wife of the US Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Joseph E. Davies , in Michael Curtiz's Ambassador to Moscow and as millionaire's wife in A Life Like a Millionaire by Roy Del Ruth , however without achieving previous successes. In 1956 Harding shot her last feature film, but completed various roles on television until 1965, including as a guest actress in series such as Ben Casey .

Ann Harding was married to actor Harry Bannister from 1926 to 1936 and to composer Werner Janssen from 1937 to 1962 , both marriages were divorced. She has a daughter from her first marriage. Harding spent her retirement in Sherman Oaks , California , where she died in 1982 at the age of 79.

Awards

Oscar / Best Actress

Two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame remember the actress. The star Höhe 6201 Hollywood Boulevard is dedicated to her work in film, the star Höhe 6840 Hollywood Boulevard commemorates her work on television.

Filmography (selection)

further reading

  • Scott O'Brien: Ann Harding: Cinema's Gallant Lady , BearManor Media, New York 2010, ISBN 1-59393-535-8

Web links

Commons : Ann Harding  - Collection of Images

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.nytimes.com/1981/09/04/obituaries/ann-harding-actress-hailed-for-roles-as-elegant-women.html
  2. ↑ Scott O'Brien: Ann Harding: Cinema's Gallant Lady , Chapter: "When I Was An Army Girl" p. 15
personal data
SURNAME Harding, Ann
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Gatley, Dorothy Walton (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION US-american actress
DATE OF BIRTH August 7, 1902
PLACE OF BIRTH Fort Sam Houston , Texas , United States
DATE OF DEATH September 1, 1981
Place of death Sherman Oaks , California , United States