Marilyn, Maureen, Myrna
…and Mark!
Good afternoon, mes chers. How are you doing? As my series on Oscar Heroines (Katharine Hepburn, Hattie McDaniel, Merle Oberon and Glenn) is doing so well, I thought I’d look at three more... Never Nominated Nancys! But first, what did you make of the BAFTAs – and the SAGs? Will it be Bassett, Condon or Curtis? (That sounds like a legal firm.) My head says Kerry, but my heart says Jamie Lee. Do young-international voters really give a fig about Angela’s legacy? As my meme on Instagram had it: “Local Man Has Only One More Week of Pretending Favourite Deserves Oscar”. You all know who I’m talking about, too. But despite Michelle Yeoh’s limitations in that overrated film, I’ll never kvetch about a sixty-something-year-old triumphing.
Two decades ago, Ms. Yeoh would’ve made an inspired nominee for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. As it stands, she’s one-and-done. Not in bad company! Toni Collette and Tilda Swinton have one citation under their belts. So do Harrison Ford and Catherine Deneuve. Oscar’s historic one-hit wonders include Lauren Bacall, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly and Marlene Dietrich. Dietrich always spoke contemptuously of the “deathbed Oscar”, the chocolate-filled Honorary doled out at the last minute. Two of the women we’re discussing today got ‘em – Myrna Loy, unable to leave her apartment, in 1991 (she choked out nine words on satellite), and a senile Maureen O’Hara in 2014. Seeing the Redhead from Ranelagh in that vulnerable state makes me wish the Academy would celebrate Glenn, Siggy Weave and Serena McKellen while they can still enjoy it.
In her memoir, Being and Becoming, Ms. Loy laments the comedienne’s fate to miss out. She had two chances at a nomination, but neither materialised. The first was 1934’s The Thin Man. When Bette Davis was snubbed for practically inventing screen acting in the same year’s Of Human Bondage, protocol was suspended and write-in votes allowed. Myrna claims she was a beneficiary! Nonetheless, it went to Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night, a role Loy turned down. Her second, the all-star The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), found her in the limbo that cost many stars their nods. A leading lady in a featured role – and in those days, striking for the lesser category was too much of an ego-bruise to contemplate.
Maureen O’Hara in ‘Tis Herself makes even more spurious claims. That John Ford personally vetoed her nomination for The Quiet Man! Have any of you read her 2004 tome? I’ve never seen such a case of Irish Alzheimer’s. Ms. O’Hara would forget anything except a grudge! Much as I blame people to do with Trinity for my life’s disappointments, she held homosexuals (and John Ford) responsible for hers. She uses All About Eve’s Anne Baxter, who conveniently died in 1985, as the stooge for her awards victimhood.
Apparently, Ms. Baxter informed Maureen that she was taken off 1952’s Best Actress shortlist, an all-time weak field, at the behest of a certain individual. Of course, the nominating procedure simply doesn’t work like that! When O’Hara next met her irascible director, Ford threw an Oscar-shaped charm bracelet her way with a gruff “That’s for what they stole from you”. Unlike Myrna Loy, Ms. O’Hara didn’t exactly excel at comedy. But her earnestness was seldom harnessed better than in a John Ford picture. Not only in The Quiet Man, but as Angharad in How Green Was My Valley (remembered today for beating Citizen Kane).
However, a more famous Hibernian heroine plodded away in Hollywood. Who also couldn’t act for toffee. Grace Kelly! I always thought she came from an Irish-American family who helped put down the railroad; it turned out she’d been laid everywhere! Oh, shut up! I hope Judy Garland in heaven would like that “joke” – having lost her Star is Born prize to La Princesse in The Country Girl. (“So Grace Kelly took home Oscar,” I imagine Judy saying “and Jack and Clark and Gary and Bill and…”) With respect to Ms. Kelly, undoubtedly beloved in Monaco, her “performance” is just putting on an old cardigan and a pair of jam jar glasses. Would Myrna or Maureen have caught Oscar’s attention if they dowdied themselves up? Marilyn certainly tried!
It’s a cruel irony that actresses playing Marilyn Monroe have a greater shake at awards glory than she ever did. She wasn’t recognised in her fifties heyday while Kelly and Audrey Hepburn, who define the era as much as she does, won for utter trifles. Although Hepburn later proved her mettle, Roman Holiday is the phoniest win on record! A fraud of a classic – like Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Even if Marilyn played Holly Golightly as Truman Capote urged (and the Mickey Rooney scenes were somehow excised), you’d still spend the whole thing longing for Patricia Neal to re-appear! I suspect the Academy felt a real lady existed underneath the histrionics, as opposed to the slatternly Marilyn who breathed carnality.
This was crisply evident in 1956 when Fox, Marilyn’s home studio, threw their weight behind the sophisticated Deborah Kerr in The King and I and ignored her acclaimed turn in Bus Stop. Columnist Sheilah Graham wrote: “The two things Marilyn most wanted during that era – an Oscar and a baby – were just to escape her grasp. To her, it meant that she wasn’t good enough”. To make matters worse, her leading man Don Murray was nominated (slumming it in Supporting, the Academy retaliated by giving it to Anthony Quinn for eight minutes onscreen). The same was true, three years later, when Some Like it Hot was acclaimed in every category – bar hers.
The 1959 Best Actress line-up is an interesting microcosm. Doris Day in her lone inclusion. Both Hepburns. And Elizabeth Taylor, the new Mrs. Eddie Fisher, before headline-grabbing health issues. But Marilyn was keenly aware that the eventual choice, Simone Signoret, was deliberate. Signoret was everything she wasn’t. Self-assured, not afraid of ageing, not particularly interested in playing the Hollywood game. And in a Gibraltar-solid marriage with Yves Montand (with whom Marilyn had a liaison on Let’s Make Love) – as she faced a third divorce.
Blinded by glamour, we often forget the punitive function these awards can have. Myrna, Maureen and Marilyn watched the Academy honour Ingrid Bergman when she was a saint; ignore her when she was a whore; and reward her when she was accepted back to the fold. Did Marilyn, like Judy, burn too many bridges with unprofessional behaviour? Or was it the fallacy that “comedy’s easy” that prevented her (and Ms. Loy) from showing up? Perhaps, Hollywood didn’t want to give the ultimate sign of town credibility to a sex symbol!
One thing’s for sure, these Never Nominated Nancys endured in ways they frankly wouldn’t had the gold man come calling.