Hope Emerson

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hope Emerson (born October 29, 1897 in Hawarden , Iowa , † April 25, 1960 in Hollywood , California ) was an American actress .

Life

Hope Emerson was born in Hawarden, in the American Midwest , in 1897 , where she also grew up. In 1916, she graduated from West High School in Des Moines and then began to gain a foothold as an actress in vaudeville theater and to appear in nightclubs as a jazz singer. With a height of 1.88 meters, a weight of 115 kilograms and a characteristic, brusque voice, she did not correspond to the current ideal of beauty and was often committed to comedic roles during her early years at the theater. So in 1930, when her theater producer Norman Bel Geddes , the role of Amazone Lampito in Aristophanes ' comedy Lysistrata entrusted with the Emerson her debut at New York's Broadway was. The two-act became a success and brought it to over 250 performances in the season from June 1930 to January 1931. Further theater engagements on Broadway such as the comedy Smiling Faces (1932) or the musical Swing Your Lady (1936–1937) followed.

Parallel to her work at the theater, Hope Emerson made her debut in the cinema in 1932 with the film adaptation of Smiling Faces . After Al Christie's nineteen-minute short film Object Not Matrimony (1935) with Ernest Truex , she turned her back on the screen to continue working as a stage actress during the Great Depression and the war years . In the 1940s she gained fame as the voice of Elsie the Cow , the corporate mascot of the Borden dairy company , and she was back in a feature film alongside Richard Conte and Victor Mature with the part of a murderous masseuse in Robert Siodmak's film noir Scream of the Big City (1948) to see. Critics praised her for the role of the "thin-lipped Amazon" and she received other film offers in Joseph L. Mankiewicz 'drama Anti-Bloodly , Jules Dassin's Danger in Frisco or George Cukor's Marital War . In all of these productions she acted alongside stars like Susan Hayward , Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy , but the character actress Emerson was only subscribed to supporting roles in the course of her film career and, because of her unusual, unfeminine appearance, was often tied to the role of the antagonist with tacitly hinted at homosexual tendencies . One of those roles that made her known to a wider audience is that of the corrupt and tyrannical prison superior Evelyn Harper in John Cromwell's drama Women's Prison , for which the New York Times, along with her film colleagues Eleanor Parker and Agnes Moorehead, calls them “devilish” and “merciless "hochlobte and a year later was nominated for the Oscar as best supporting actress was awarded. In 1995, some film clips with Emerson and leading actress Eleanor Parker were recorded in Rob Epstein's and Jeffrey Friedman's documentary The Celluloid Closet , which, like the novel by Vito Russo, takes on the Hollywood image of gays , lesbians , bisexuals and transgender characters.

From the mid-1950s onwards Hope Emerson turned more and more to television and appeared in several episodes of well-known series such as Studio One (1955-1958), The 20th Century-Fox Hour (1955) and the Goodyear Television Playhouse (1957). In 1958 she got a recurring role with the engagement as nightclub owner "Mother" in the popular crime series Peter Gunn alongside Craig Stevens and Lola Albright , for which she was nominated for an Emmy a year later . In 1959 she left the series when she was offered the bigger role of housekeeper Amelia "Sarge" Sargent in the weekly format The Dennis O'Keefe Show . A short time after filming of the show, which starred Dennis O'Keefe as a single father and newspaper columnist, stopped filming , Emerson died of liver infection at the age of 62 . The actress, who was neither married nor had children throughout her life, was buried in Grace Hill Cemetery in the city of her birth.

Filmography (selection)

Plays (selection)

  • 1930-1931: Lysistrata
  • 1932: Smiling Faces
  • 1936–1937: Swing Your Lady
  • 1947: Street Scene

literature

  • Karen Burroughs Hannsberry: Femme noir: bad girls of film . McFarland, Jefferson, NC 1998, ISBN 0-7864-0429-9 .
  • Alfred E. Twomey, Arthur F. McClure: The versatiles: a study of supporting character actors and actresses in the American motion picture 1930-1955 . AS Barnes, South Brunswick NJ 1969, ISBN 0-498-06792-0 .

Web links

Commons : Hope Emerson  - Collection of Images

Footnotes

  1. ↑ cf. Tom Langdon: Hope Emerson.  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at: desmoinesregister.com (English)@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / desmoinesregister.com  
  2. ↑ a b cf. Ephraim Katz: The Macmillan international film encyclopedia . Macmillan, New York 1994, ISBN 0-333-61601-4 .
  3. ↑ cf. Profile at Hollywood.com (English)
  4. ↑ cf. At the Roxy. In: The New York Times. September 30, 1948.
  5. ↑ cf. Bleak Picture of a Women's Prison. In: The New York Times. May 20, 1950.
  6. ↑ cf. Profile at findagrave.com (English)
personal data
SURNAME Emerson, Hope
BRIEF DESCRIPTION US-american actress
DATE OF BIRTH October 29, 1897
PLACE OF BIRTH Hawarden , Iowa
DATE OF DEATH April 25, 1960
Place of death Hollywood , California