Rosalind Russell

The Full Biography

Rosalind Russell. Actress. The Waterbury girl who made the career woman a leading lady, then spent the last years as Auntie Mame on two coasts and a humanitarian the Academy finally knew how to honor.

This is her story.

The image most people still carry is Hildy Johnson talking faster than Cary Grant in a newspaper office, or an aunt in velvet telling a nephew that life is a banquet, or Mama Rose pushing a daughter toward a spotlight the mother cannot enter. The years are 1940, 1958, 1962. What the still cannot show is Catherine Rosalind Russell of Waterbury, Connecticut, the middle child of seven, named not for Shakespeare but for the S.S. Rosalind, a Catholic girl who trained at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and a death in Beverly Hills on November 28, 1976, after breast cancer, with a special Oscar already on the shelf for work that had nothing to do with a close-up.

She was born on June 4, 1907, in Waterbury, to James Edward Russell, a lawyer, and Clara McKnight, a teacher. Seven children. The Church. A household that expected competence. She went to Marymount in Tarrytown and then to the American Academy in New York. The stage came first: stock, then Broadway enough to be noticed. MGM signed her in the mid-1930s and put her in elegant supporting weather — the other woman, the smart friend, the society face. She was not immediately the star the stills now suggest. She was a contract actress learning how to take a scene away without looking as if she had come to steal it. Craig’s Wife (1936), on loan, gave her a cold household tyrant and a taste of what happened when the studio let her be unlikable. The parts improved because she made the dialogue sound like thought.

The door was 1939 and 1940, back to back.

George Cukor’s The Women (1939) is an all-female cast and a social comedy with knives. Russell played Sylvia Fowler, a gossip who treats friendship as a blood sport. She did not wink at the audience. She played the cruelty as if it were oxygen. The picture made her a name people repeated. Then Howard Hawks recast Hildy Johnson — a role written as a man in The Front Page — as a woman, and put Russell opposite Cary Grant in His Girl Friday (1940). The speed of the talk is still a classroom object. She matches Grant line for line and then passes him. The chemistry is professional, not coy. Hildy wants the story more than she wants the wedding. Hawks shot overlapping dialogue until the office felt like a real city room. Russell became, in a single picture, the model of the Hollywood career woman: tailored, funny, unwilling to pretend stupidity for a man’s comfort. It is the performance the obituaries still lead with, and they are right to.

My Sister Eileen (1942) earned her first Academy Award nomination, a comedy about two Ohio sisters in a Greenwich Village basement. She would be nominated four times for Best Actress and never win the competitive statue: Sister Kenny (1946), as the Australian nurse who fought the medical establishment over polio treatment; Mourning Becomes Electra (1947), Eugene O’Neill at full tragic volume; and, a decade on, Auntie Mame (1958). The dramatic nominations matter because they prove the town knew she was not only a talker. Sister Kenny in particular asked her to carry a crusade without speechmaking. She did. The public, being the public, loved her more when she made them laugh.

She kept a film schedule through the 1940s and early 1950s that would exhaust a less organized woman. Hired Wife and This Thing Called Love kept the career-woman line hot. Take a Letter, Darling (1942) put her in charge of an office and a man. My Sister Eileen had a long afterlife in revivals and in the musical it would become. Flight for Freedom borrowed Amelia Earhart weather. What a Woman! (1943) was another boss-and-writer comedy. Roughly Speaking (1945), from Louise Randall Pierson’s memoir, asked her to play a mother who keeps a household alive through crash and war — a part that used the will without the wisecrack speed. Sister Kenny (1946) was the crusade. The Velvet Touch (1948) made her a stage star who may have killed. Tell It to the Judge, A Woman of Distinction (1950), Never Wave at a WAC — Columbia and the independents used her the way MGM had, as the woman who can run a scene. In 1941 she married Frederick Brisson, a Danish-born producer, at a wedding Cary Grant helped arrange; Grant was best man. The marriage lasted until her death. They had one son, Lance. Brisson produced some of the stage work that became the second monument. In 1953 she took Broadway’s Wonderful Town, a Leonard Bernstein–Betty Comden–Adolph Green musical drawn from the same Ruth McKenney stories as My Sister Eileen, and won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical. Hollywood had not asked her to sing. New York discovered she could carry a score. Then Patrick Dennis’s novel Auntie Mame became a play, and Russell became Mame Dennis on Broadway in 1956: the aunt who treats existence as a banquet and refuses to let a nephew starve in good taste. The 1958 film, directed by Morton DaCosta, brought the performance to people who would never see the play. A fourth Oscar nomination. The line about the banquet is the character’s, and she put it on the cover of her posthumous autobiography anyway, because she knew which sentence the country would keep.

Joshua Logan’s Picnic (1955) had already given her Rosemary, a schoolteacher whose night of release is also a humiliation — a reminder that Russell could play hunger without a wisecrack. She had also, in those mid-fifties years, taken The Girl Rush and television appearances that treated her as a host, not a relic. Mervyn LeRoy’s Gypsy (1962), from the Arthur Laurents–Jule Styne–Stephen Sondheim musical, made her Mama Rose. Rosalind Russell is not Ethel Merman; the singing was partly dubbed by Lisa Kirk. What she brought was a mother’s will that is also a wound. The picture is how a generation who never saw the stage version first met Rose. A Majority of One (1961) put her opposite Alec Guinness as a Brooklyn widow in Tokyo. Five Finger Exercise (1962) asked for a drawing-room crack-up. The Trouble with Angels (1966) as a Mother Superior opposite Hayley Mills, and Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows (1968) kept her working into an age when the industry prefers to forget career women it once hired by the yard. Between those titles she still did the variety hours and the benefits, because the voice was a civic tool as much as a studio one.

Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death.Rosalind Russell as Mame Dennis — the line she put on her autobiography

The turn is the second Broadway life. Many film comediennes fade when the studio system thins. Russell went east, took a musical, took Mame, and came back with a signature the pictures had not yet given her. Then she used the fame for hospitals and for women whose cancer the columns still treated as unmentionable.

She left the grind of being only MGM’s smart friend. The stage, the nuns, and the humanitarian calendar became the remaining job.

The later years

Home was Beverly Hills with Brisson and a social life that doubled as fundraising. The house was a working marriage, not a shrine: Lance, guests, scripts, and then, as the 1960s turned, doctors. Rheumatoid arthritis arrived and stayed. Breast cancer arrived and stayed. She did not turn either diagnosis into a farewell tour. She worked when the body allowed and advocated when it did not. The Trouble with Angels (1966), for Ida Lupino, and its sequel, Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows (1968), let her play a Mother Superior with a wink for a family audience — Hayley Mills on one side of the convent joke, Russell on the other. Rosie! (1967) was a smaller comedy. Mrs. Pollifax — Spy (1971), from Dorothy Gilman’s novels, was the last feature: a widow recruited by the CIA, a lark that is also a woman of a certain age still being hired as the engine of a plot. After that the screen work stopped. The civic work did not. She raised money for the Motion Picture and Television Relief Fund, for hospitals, and for cancer research at a time when breast cancer was still a phrase many public women would not say. She sat on boards. She made calls. She lent the famous voice and the famous will. Colleagues remembered professionalism and good humor, which, in a sickroom as on a set, is a form of competence. Chris Chase sat with her on the memoir. The banquet line became a title because she had already spent a decade living as if the alternative — starving in good taste — was the real vulgarity.

On March 27, 1973, at the 45th Academy Awards, she received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. It is the statue the Academy gives when the competitive categories have already failed a career and the board wants to tell the truth about a life. She accepted it as Roz — no speechifying, no inventory of pictures. The four nominations sat in the file. The Hersholt sat in the house. She finished the memoir with the help of Chris Chase. She did not live to see it published. On November 28, 1976, she died of breast cancer in Beverly Hills. She was sixty-nine. Brisson survived her until 1984 and kept producing. Lance survived them both. The funeral was of a Catholic woman who had kept the faith and of a star the town had actually liked, which is rarer than the notices admit. The Motion Picture Home and the cancer desks she had worked for sent people, not wreaths only. That is the correct last guest list for a woman who had treated a benefit the way Hildy treated a deadline.

The last public Russell was not Hildy at a typewriter. It was an older woman with arthritis in the hands that had once held a reporter’s notebook, still raising money, still married to the man Grant had stood up with, still refusing to treat illness as a scandal. She had already given the country the banquet line. She spent the last years acting as if she believed it, which is harder than saying it in a velvet coat.

After she was gone

Life Is a Banquet appeared in 1977. His Girl Friday became a syllabus film, the thing you show when you need to explain screwball speed and a woman who will not be rewritten back into a wife. Auntie Mame remained the costume-party and the comfort picture. Gypsy remained the argument about mothers. The Hersholt is still the accurate honor, because the competitive Oscars never caught her at the right moment and the hospitals did. Waterbury kept the claim. Film restorations kept the talk. She did not have a long, decorated old age on talk shows. She had a marriage, a son, a Tony, four nominations, a last spy comedy, and a death that made the advocacy specific. If you only remember the banquet, you have the line. If you remember Hildy and the Hersholt and the cancer work, you have her.

Acting is standing up naked and turning around very slowly.Rosalind Russell

The still of Hildy at the desk will last. It should. But the life behind it was seven children in Waterbury, a ship’s name, a wedding Grant attended, a musical Tony, a mother in Gypsy, and a last decade of arthritis, cancer, and checks written for people who would never see The Women. She came out of Connecticut, found the one kind of talking the camera would take, and then, when the camera had had its run, she put the famous will to work in rooms without a premiere. That is the arc. That is the story.

Portrait: Unknown author (studio portrait, c.1940) · Public domain (pre-1964, not renewed) · via Wikimedia Commons

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