Isabel Jeans

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Isabel Jeans (born September 16, 1891 in London , England , † September 4, 1985 there ) was a British actress .

life and career

Isabel Jeans was born in London to an art critic . Her brother Desmond Jeans (1903-1974) was a boxer and later an actor. Isabel's sister Ursula Jeans (1906–1973) also worked as an actress and also married an actor with Roger Livesey .

Isabel initially considered becoming a singer until the famous theater director Herbert Beerbohm Tree gave her a role at the age of 15. In 1915 Jeans appeared for the first time on Broadway in New York with the plays The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife and A Midsummer Night's Dream - in the role of the fairy queen Titania . She returned to the UK soon after, but had two other guest appearances on Broadway in later years. One of her major successes in London was Kissing Time , which was performed 430 times between 1919 and 1920. In later years she appeared in classic plays by Oscar Wilde such as The Importance of Being Earnest , A Woman Without Meaning and Lady Windermeres Fan , in which she played under the direction of John Gielgud . In the course of her theater career, Jeans built a reputation as a versatile and talented character actress. An American newspaper article from 1937 wrote of the success of her acting career:

Indeed, her record of play and screen credits occupies more than a page in "Who's Who in the Theater"

In 1917, Isabel Jeans made her film debut in a British silent film. However, she only acted in films occasionally when the roles were appropriate. Jeans appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's British films Downwards and Easy Virtue , in the latter film she even played the lead role. When Isabel Jeans came to Hollywood in the late 1930s, she was mostly cast in supporting roles as a fine English lady. In Suspicion (1941) Jeans starred again in 1941 under Hitchcock's direction in the role of Mrs. Newsham alongside Joan Fontaine and Cary Grant . However, her career continued to focus mainly on the theater and so she only made a few films, most successfully as courtesan Aunt Alice in the musical film Gigi (1958), which won nine Oscars .

In the 1970s she increasingly withdrew from acting. She died in 1985 at the age of 93 in her native London. From 1913 to 1915 Jeans was married to the later film star Claude Rains , the marriage was considered turbulent. Rains later married five more times and so he played in the mid-1920s in The Rivals with his ex-wives Jeans and Marie Hemmingway as well as his current wife Beatrix Thomson at the time. From 1920 until his death in 1963 she was married to lawyer Gilbert Wakefield.

Filmography (selection)

  • 1921: Tilly of Bloomsbury
  • 1925: The Rat of Paris (The Rat)
  • 1927: Downhill (Downhill)
  • 1928: Easy Virtue
  • 1929: Power Over Men
  • 1937: Tovarich
  • 1938: Madame rang the bell? (Fools for Scandal)
  • 1938: Garden of the Moon
  • 1939: Man About Town
  • 1941: suspected (Suspicion)
  • 1948: Elizabeth of Ladymead
  • 1957: It Happened in Rome - Three girls conquer Rome (Souvenir d'Italie)
  • 1958: Gigi
  • 1960: Princess Olympia (A Breath of Scandal)
  • 1963: Heavenly Delights (Heavens Above!)
  • 1969: Magic Christian ( The Magic Christian )

Web links

Commons : Isabel Jeans  - Collection of Images

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Herald-Journal - Google News Archive Search. In: news.google.com. August 29, 1937, accessed January 3, 2015 .
  2. ^ David J. Skal: Claude Rains. University Press of Kentucky, 2009, ISBN 978-0-813-13885-5 , p. 38. Limited preview in Google Book Search
personal data
SURNAME Jeans, Isabel
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British actress
DATE OF BIRTH September 16, 1891
PLACE OF BIRTH London , England
DATE OF DEATH 4th September 1985
Place of death London , England , UK