Eve
November 25, 2005, 3:27pm
1
I kow she’ll be pretty much ignored in the mad rush of public grief over Pat Morita, but I thought some might find this interesting (from the London Times ):
Constance Cummings, the American-born actress who died on Wednesday aged 95, remained at the top of her profession on both sides of the Atlantic for more than half a century. As beautiful as she was intelligent, she had the rare gift of being able to act in films and plays with equal grace and authority. In later years, her appearances on television included series such as The Power Game, Craig’s Wife, and Rodney Ackland’s play, The Old Ladies. Having been a Hollywood film star in the 1930s, and having won a fine reputation in the comedies of her English husband, the producer-playwright Benn W Levy (who became an MP after the Second World War), she played increasingly serious-minded roles in middle age, and triumphed in two modern tragedies: Long Day’s Journey Into Night, opposite Laurence Olivier, and Wings, a solo performance, at the National Theatre in the 1970s . . .
. . . Born in Seattle, Washington, on May 15 1910, Constance Cummings was a lawyer’s daughter. She wanted to be a classical dancer. After a walk-on part as a prostitute in summer stock at the age of 16, she joined a Broadway chorus line (“you should have seen those high kicks of mine”) and caught the eye of Hollywood’s Sam Goldwyn. He wanted to see her in a film opposite Ronald Colman, then changed his mind. Colman, taking pity, persuaded an agent to find her work and her first film, The Criminal Code, with Walter Huston, was a success. It was one of 14 American films which she made over the course of two years; the most notable was perhaps Movie Crazy with Harold Lloyd. When she tried to make a film in England she had to fight a lawsuit with Columbia Pictures, which she won . . .
. . . she joined the Old Vic Company at the Buxton Festival when the war broke out to play Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, Miss Richland in Goldsmith’s Good-Natured Man and the lead in Shaw’s Saint Joan. Both her Juliet and her Joan were praised for their emotional intensity. During the war she acted in half a dozen plays for the troops as well as in West End productions such as Sky Lark (Duchess, 1942) and The Petrified Forest (Globe, 1942). Then, in 1945, she starred with Rex Harrison in David Lean’s film of Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit . . . An equal challenge arose from Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Piccadilly, 1964) when the American originals left the company, and she and Ray MacAnally took over as the embattled pair of alcoholics. Their success was unquestioned. After being teamed with Joan Greenwood as a more frivolous fellow-tippler in Coward’s Fallen Angels, seriousness set in again as Gertrude to Nicol Williamson’s Hamlet (Round House, 1969) . . . When Benn Levy died in 1973, Constance Cummings continued to run their dairy farm of 600 acres in Oxfordshire. She also continued to act, appearing on stage and on radio. In her 90th year she was touring in Uncle Vanya.
Quite a career, and I cut more than half the obit out!
Is the porn star of the same name still around?
Thanks, Eve. What a career! The people she met and worked with, wow.
But the worst part is that she probably won’t be buried in Woodlawn Cemetery.
