Nancy Coleman

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Nancy Katherine Coleman (born December 30, 1912 in Everett , Washington , † January 18, 2000 in Brockport , New York ) was an American actress .

Life

childhood and education

Nancy Coleman was born in 1912 (1914 or 1917 according to other information) to Grace (birth name: Sharpless or Sharplass) and Charles S. Coleman. Her father was a reporter for the Everett Daily Herald and later its editor. Her mother, a former violinist, worked for the social section of the local newspaper. Coleman grew up with a sister three years his junior and took an early interest in reading. She was introduced to the theater through her mother and she saw numerous plays by JM Barrie performed by the Moroni Olsen Players . Then Coleman began to get excited about a career as a stage actress. After graduating from high school in Everett, she attended the University of Washington in Seattle from 1930 , where she studied English literature. There she and her fellow student Frances Farmer vied for roles in several of the school's own theater productions.

After graduating ( Bachelor of Arts ) at the time of the " Great Depression " in 1934, Coleman, who was a member of the Kappa Alpha Theta fraternity, began a teacher training course at Columbia University under pressure from her parents . She broke off an engagement at that time in order to pursue her acting career in San Francisco , where she moved with her mother and sister in the spring of 1935. Coleman initially earned her living there as an elevator operator for the department store chain The Emporium . During this work she was approached and introduced to a casting agent for NBC , who helped her to get well paid assignments in radio plays. After two years of studying acting with Reginald Travers, Coleman moved the money she had earned back to New York in January 1937 , where she lived in the Rehearsal Club , a well-known guesthouse for actors, dancers and singers. Her initially few fees as an actress were supplemented by assignments as a model. She studied acting with Benno Schneider for a year.

Success in the theater and first film roles

The breakthrough on the New York stage came in April 1937 with the part of the neurotic daughter of Gertrude Lawrence in the play Susan and God at the Plymouth Theater. Coleman had taken over the role from actress friend Nancy Kelly and rehearsed it within a week. This earned her the praise of Gertrude Lawrence, who prophesied a great theater career for the red-haired actress. Coleman also toured with the role of Blossom and was later signed by the CBS . In 1941 she took on the title role in the Broadway musical Liberty Jones , which did not get beyond 22 performances. After unsuccessful auditions and test recordings with film producers such as David O. Selznick in New York, she moved to Los Angeles , where she auditioned for several film roles.

Coleman still had the female lead in the 1941 Warner Bros. -Film lost his last command to Olivia de Havilland , she soon played a supporting role in Sam Wood's successful drama Kings Row with Ann Sheridan , Robert Cummings and Ronald Reagan in the leading roles. Her performance as the mentally unstable daughter of Charles Coburn was well received by Jack L. Warner and she was awarded a seven-year contract. The critically acclaimed and multiple Oscar- nominated film was held back a year due to the war , so that Coleman's first film to be released was Robert Florey's Dangerously They Live (1941). In the spy film she slipped alongside John Garfield in the female lead role of a mysterious British agent who is being pursued by German spies. The part earned her first praise from critics.

After first working in front of the camera, Warner repeatedly entrusted Coleman with supporting roles in his large studio productions. In the less successful literary film Die Gaylords , she appeared together with Barbara Stanwyck and Geraldine Fitzgerald as three sisters fleeing from broken marriages who are fighting for an inheritance worth billions. She then appeared alongside Errol Flynn in the two war films Sabotage Order Berlin (1942) and Aufstand in Trollness (1943). In the latter film about a Norwegian underground movement that decided to fight against the German occupiers, Coleman slipped into the role of the nervous Polish lover of a Nazi captain (played by Helmut Dantine ). The Warner Bros. production Devotion , which was completed in 1943, did not come to American theaters before 1946 due to a lawsuit brought by Olivia de Havilland. The film by Curtis Bernhardt dramatized the lives of the Bronte country . In addition to Ida Lupino (Emily) and De Havilland (Charlotte), Coleman was seen in a supporting role as Anne.

Break with Warner and the end of his film career

In 1943 Coleman fell in love with Whitney Bolton, twelve years his senior. The former journalist worked as a press agent for Warner. Although the film studio intrigued against the couple's plans to marry, Coleman and Bolton married on September 16, 1943. As a result, the actress lost the female lead in The Adventures of Mark Twain (1944) to Alexis Smith and, according to her own account, was offered increasingly poor scripts. She only stood in front of the camera once for a Warner film. In Vincent Sherman's drama In Our Time , Coleman appeared as the sister of Paul Henreid , who was modernizing a farm in Poland together with Ida Lupino shortly before the outbreak of World War II. Sherman highlighted Coleman's talent and unusual looks, but criticized the film studio for not using the actress well. Similar to her professional colleagues Jane Bryan and Andrea Leeds before her, Coleman was almost always denied artistically demanding roles. The collaboration with the studio came to a standstill after Coleman became pregnant and had not received approval from Warner for the lead role in the CBS radio play Intermezzo (based on the film of the same name with Ingrid Bergman ).

After the collaboration with Warner ended, Coleman took roles in low-budget films ( Her Sister's Secret , 1946; Violence , 1947) only two years later . In 1947 she appeared in Dudley Nichols several times for the Oscar nominated Eugene O'Neill adaptation Mourning Becomes Electra by RKO Pictures with Rosalind Russell and Michael Redgrave in the leading roles. The drama, which Coleman had hoped to revive her film career, was a huge failure at the US box office and was subsequently severely cut. She then stopped working in film and moved with her family to New York in 1949, where her husband returned to the Morning Telegraph as a theater critic . Coleman only worked sporadically in movies ( That Man from Tangier , 1953; Sklaven , 1969).

From the 1950s she made repeated appearances on American television, including guest roles in television plays at the Kraft Theater , Tales of Tomorrow , Star Tonight and the United States Steel Hour . Coleman had a success on New York's Broadway with Robert Montgomery's production of Joseph Hayes ' The Desperate Hours . The contemporary play performed at the Ethel Barrymore Theater was about the kidnapping of a couple (played by Coleman and Karl Malden ) and their children by armed robbers (including Paul Newman ). It had over 200 performances between February and August 1955 and won two Tony Awards . In the 1960s, Coleman joined theater tours abroad (Europe, Middle East, Latin America 1961; South Africa, 1964). She continued her acting career into the 1980s.

Private life

Nancy Coleman was married to press agent and journalist Whitney Bolton until his death in 1969. The marriage resulted in twin daughters (* July 1944). Bolton brought a son from a first marriage. After the death of her husband, Coleman counted the prominent New York surgeon Henry Ross to her circle of friends.

Coleman lived in New York until 1998 when she moved to the Actor Fund Retirement Home in Englewood, New Jersey . In 1999 she moved to a retirement home in Brockport (New York), where she died in early 2000 at the age of 87 of complications from pneumonia.

Plays (selection)

  • 1937: Susan and God (Plymouth Theater, New York; role: Blossom Trexel)
  • 1939: Stage Door (Theater-by-the-Sea, Matunuck, Rhode Island ; role: Kay)
  • 1940: Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch (Mohawk Drama Festival, Schenectady , New York; role: Lovely Mary)
  • 1941: Liberty Jones (Shubert Theater, New York; role: Liberty Jones)
  • 1952: The Male Animal ( Music Box Theater , New York; role: Ellen Turner)
  • 1952: The Sacred Flame (President Theater, New York; role: Nurse Wayland)
  • 1955: The Desperate Hours (Ethel Barrymore Theater, New York; role: Eleanor Hillard)
  • 1956: The Damask Cheek (Fred Miller Theater, Milwaukee ; role: Rhoda)
  • 1957: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Capri Theater, Atlantic Beach, New York; role: Maggie)
  • 1958: The Country Girl (San Juan Drama Festival, Puerto Rico ; role: Georgie)
  • 1958: Epitaph for George Dillon (Capri Theater, Atlantic Beach, New York; role: Ruth Gray)
  • 1961: The Glass Menagerie (toured Europe and the Middle East; role: Laura)
  • 1961: The Miracle Worker (toured Latin America; role: Kate Keller)
  • 1962: Black Monday (Van Dam Theater, New York)
  • 1962: USA (Fred Miller Theater, Milwaukee)
  • 1964: Never Too Late (tour in South Africa; role: Edith)
  • 1968/69: Lemonade (Jan Hus Playhouse, New York; role: Edith)
  • 1981: Morning's at Seven (Theater of the Performing Arts, Miami / Atlanta; role: Cora)

Filmography (selection)

literature

  • Bubbeo, Daniel: The women of Warner Brothers: the lives and careers of 15 leading ladies . Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002.- ISBN 9780786411375 .

Web links

Commons : Nancy Coleman  - Collection of Images

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g cf. Rigdon, Walter: Coleman, Nancy . In: Rigdon, Walter (Ed.): The biographical encyclopaedia & who's who of the American theater . New York: Heineman, 1966. (accessed via WBIS Online ).
  2. ↑ cf. Profile at filmreference.com (accessed January 1, 2011).
  3. ↑ cf. Bubbeo, Daniel: The women of Warner Brothers: the lives and careers of 15 leading ladies . Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002.- ISBN 9780786411375 . P. 19.
  4. ↑ a b cf. Fine, Mary Jane: Encore! . In: The Record (Bergen County, NJ). August 8, 1999, p. L01.
  5. ↑ cf. Crowther, Bosley: 'Dangerously They Live,' a Spy Thriller With John Garfield, Raymond Massey and Nancy Coleman, Opens at Strand . In: The New York Times , April 11, 1942.
  6. ↑ cf. Bubbeo, Daniel: The women of Warner Brothers: the lives and careers of 15 leading ladies . Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002.- ISBN 9780786411375 . P. 26.
  7. ↑ cf. Bubbeo, Daniel: The women of Warner Brothers: the lives and careers of 15 leading ladies . Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002.- ISBN 9780786411375 . P. 27.
  8. ↑ cf. Biography at allemovie.com (accessed August 31, 2010).
  9. ↑ cf. Bubbeo, Daniel: The women of Warner Brothers: the lives and careers of 15 leading ladies . Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002.- ISBN 9780786411375 . P. 29.
personal data
SURNAME Coleman, Nancy
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Coleman, Nancy Katherine (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION US-american actress
DATE OF BIRTH December 30, 1912
PLACE OF BIRTH Everett , Washington , United States
DATE OF DEATH January 18, 2000
Place of death Brockport , New York , United States