Maggie McNamara

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Marguerite "Maggie" McNamara (born June 18, 1928 in New York City , New York ; † February 18, 1978 ibid) was an American actress and model .

Life

Work as a photo model and beginnings as a theater actress

Maggie McNamara was born Marguerite McNamara in New York in 1928 and grew up with a brother and two sisters. She attended St. Catherine of Genoa School in her hometown and later a textile school. She began working as a photo model as a teenager. She appeared twice on the front cover of US magazine Life ; later she took acting classes.

At the age of 23 she was discovered by the Austrian-American film and theater director Otto Preminger . This gave the charismatic, dark-haired actress the part of Patty O'Neill in the National Company production of F. Hugh Herbert's The Moon Is Blue in Chicago, which was successfully created by Barbara Bel Geddes on Broadway . In the comedy, McNamara played the lead role for 18 months as an attractive young woman who, despite the advances of two aging playboys, intends to be a virgin .

Broadway success and feature film debut

In February 1952, McNamara made her Broadway debut in The King of Friday's Men , which earned her critical acclaim. Brooks Atkinson , theater critic for the New York Times , judged her: she is "remarkably beautiful and has a talent for acting." (Original sound: "remarkably pretty and has a gift for acting.") . In 1953 Maggie McNamara was engaged for the film version of the same name of The Moon Is Blue (English title clouds are everywhere ) . She signed a contract with 20th Century Fox film studio and starred alongside William Holden and David Niven . The controversial film material, directed by Otto Preminger, challenged the Hays Codes and fueled the anger of US censors, including the Legion of Decency , which was founded in 1933 . Nevertheless, clouds are published all over the US, where it was placed among the ten best films by industry magazine Variety for 16 weeks .

Preminger picked Maggie McNamara because, in his opinion, she brought the innocent, virgin look to the film. With Barbara Bel Geddes, who played the role to perfection on Broadway, he feared that she would not look young enough in front of the camera. In fact, McNamara received a nomination for Best Actress at the 1954 Academy Awards ; but she had to surrender to the British Audrey Hepburn ( One Heart and One Crown ) . A year later, she was honored for her first film role with a nomination for the British Film Academy Award for best young actress.

End of the film career and early death

After clouds are everywhere , McNamara was only to appear in three more films. In Preminger's German film version of Clouds Are Everywhere , The Jungfrau auf dem Dach (1953) with Hardy Krüger and Johanna Matz in the leading roles, she acted together with William Holden in small guest roles as a tourist couple. Jean Negulesco's Three Coins in the Well (1954) about three American women dreaming of great love in distant Rome was more successful . The romantic comedy, in which Louis Jourdan , Dorothy McGuire and Jean Peters were her film partners, received an Oscar nomination for best picture . At the same time, it was the first film production that was filmed on location outside the Hollywood studios on original locations in Cinemascope format .

After Philip Dunne's biography King of the Actors (1955) with Richard Burton , Maggie McNamara left Hollywood. Her marriage to the director and screenwriter David Swift (1919-2001) had failed. He had cheated on McNamara, who had a nervous breakdown as a result. More than seven years after her last film, her former mentor and sponsor Otto Preminger saw her again. If McNamara had previously made a balanced and happy impression on him, it now seemed different, as he later recorded in his autobiography. In it he listed her alongside Marilyn Monroe and Gene Tierney as "another actress" who suffered extraordinarily after her rise to star. Preminger helped McNamara to get another film role in The Cardinal in 1963 . A year earlier, she appeared in a supporting role in the Broadway play Step on a Crack . Despite Preminger's help, there was no renewed career in the cinema. After sporadic appearances on US television, for example in episodes of the television series The Twilight Zone (1963), The Greatest Show on Earth and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (both 1964), McNamara disappeared from the screen, the big screen and the theater stage in the mid-1960s.

After her acting career, Maggie McNamara worked as a typist for an insurance company. Divorced from husband David Swift, she committed suicide with a sleeping pill overdose in 1978 at the age of 49 . She left a suicide note. Friends reported that she had suffered from severe depression for a long time. The actress, who has often been compared to Leslie Caron or Audrey Hepburn, was buried in Saint Charles Cemetery in Farmingdale on Long Island .

Filmography (selection)

Plays (selection)

  • 1951: The Moon Is Blue
  • 1952: The King of Friday's Men
  • 1962: Step on a crack

Awards

Web links

Commons : Maggie McNamara  - Collection of Images

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ cf. The Associated Press , March 16, 1978, BC cycle (accessed February 4, 2007 via LexisNexis Business ).
  2. ↑ cf. Maggie McNamara . In: Daniel Blum (Ed.): Theater world. Season 1947-48; Season 1949-50; Season 1950–1951 . Norman Macdonald [et al.], New York 1948-1951. (accessed on November 1, 2009 via WBIS ).
  3. ↑ cf. Otto Preminger: Preminger. An autobiography . Doubleday, Garden City, NY 1977. p. 108.
  4. ↑ cf. Three coins in the well . In: The large TV feature film film lexicon (CD-ROM). Directmedia Publ., 2006, ISBN 978-3-89853-036-1 .
  5. ↑ a b cf. Preminger, p. 94.
  6. ↑ cf. Maggie McNamara Actress star of Moon is Blue . In: The Globe and Mail (Canada), March 17, 1978 (accessed February 4, 2007 via LexisNexis Wirtschaft)
personal data
SURNAME McNamara, Maggie
ALTERNATIVE NAMES McNamara, Marguerite
BRIEF DESCRIPTION US-american actress
DATE OF BIRTH June 18, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City , New York , United States
DATE OF DEATH February 18, 1978
Place of death New York City , New York , United States