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Mary Wickes

 
Actor: Mary Wickes
Home > Library > Entertainment & Arts > Actors
  • Born: Jun 13, 1910 in St. Louis, Missouri
  • Died: Oct 22, 1995 in Los Angeles, California
  • Occupation: Actor
  • Active: '40s-'60s, '80s-'90s
  • Major Genres: Comedy, Drama
  • Career Highlights: Sister Act, Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit, Sigmund and the Sea Monsters: Season 01
  • First Major Screen Credit: I Love Lucy: The Ballet (1952)

Biography

"I'm not a comic," insisted Mary Wickes. "I'm an actress who plays comedy." True enough; still Wickes was often heaps funnier than the so-called comics she supported. The daughter of a well-to-do St. Louis banker, Wickes was an excellent student, completing a political science degree at the University of Washington at the age of 18. She intended to become a lawyer, but she was deflected into theatre. During her stock company apprenticeship, Wickes befriended Broadway star Ina Claire, who wrote the young actress a letter of introduction to powerful New York producer Sam Harris. She made her Broadway debut in 1934, spending the next five seasons in a variety of characterizations (never the ingenue). In 1939, she found time to make her film bow in the Red Skelton 2-reeler Seein' Red. After a string of Broadway flops, Wickes scored a hit as long-suffering Nurse Preen (aka "Nurse Bedpan") in the Kaufman-Hart comedy classic The Man Who Came to Dinner. She was brought to Hollywood to repeat her role in the 1941 film version of Dinner.

After a brief flurry of movie activity, Wickes went back to the stage, returning to Hollywood in 1948 in a role specifically written for her in The Decision of Christopher Blake. Thereafter, she remained in great demand in films, playing an exhausting variety of nosy neighbors, acerbic housekeepers and imperious maiden aunts. Though her characters were often snide and sarcastic, Wickes was careful to inject what she called "heart" into her portrayals; indeed, it is very hard to find an out-and-out villainess in her manifest. Even when she served as the model for Cruella DeVil in the 1961 animated feature 101 Dalmations, Cruella's voice was dubbed by the far more malevolent-sounding Betty Lou Gerson. Far busier on TV than in films, Wickes was a regular on ten weekly series between 1953 and 1985, earning an Emmy nomination for her work on 1961's The Gertrude Berg Show. She also has the distinction of being the first actress to essay the role of Mary Poppins in a 1949 Studio One presentation. Throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, Wickes did a great deal of guest-artist work in colleges and universities; during this period she herself went back to school, earning a master's degree from UCLA. Maintaining her professional pace into the 1990s, Wickes scored a hit with modern moviegoers as Sister Mary Lazarus in the two Sister Act comedies. Mary Wickes' final performance was a voiceover stint as one of the gargoyles in Disney's animated Hunchback of Notre Dame; she died a few days before finishing this assignment, whereupon Jane Withers dubbed in the leftover dialogue. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
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Wikipedia: Mary Wickes
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Mary Wickes

Wickes guest-starring in the television series Zorro (1957-1959) as Dolores Bastinado
Born Mary Isabelle Wickenhauser
June 13, 1910(1910-06-13)
St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.
Died October 22, 1995 (aged 85)
Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Occupation Actress
Years active 1934–1995

Mary Isabella Wickes (June 13, 1910 – October 22, 1995) was an American film and television actress.

Wickes was born as Mary Isabelle Wickenhauser in St. Louis, Missouri, of German Irish Protestant extraction.[1][2] She graduated at the age of eighteen with a degree in political science from Washington University in St. Louis, where she joined the Phi Mu women's fraternity. Wickes' first Broadway appearance was in Marc Connelly's The Farmer Takes a Wife in 1934 with Henry Fonda. She began acting in films in the late 1930s, and was also a member of the Orson Welles troupe on his radio drama Mercury Theatre of the Air. One of her earliest significant film appearances was in The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942), reprising her stage role of "Nurse Preen".

A tall (5'10"), gangling woman with a distinctive voice, Wickes would ultimately prove herself adept as a comedienne, but she first attracted attention in the film Now, Voyager (1942), as the wisecracking nurse who helped Bette Davis' character during her mother's illness. (She appeared with Davis again in June Bride.) The same year she had a large part in the Abbott and Costello comedy Who Done It?. She continued playing supporting roles in films during the next decade, usually playing wisecracking characters. A prime example was her deadpan characterization of Stella, the harassed housekeeper, in the Doris Day vehicles By the Light of the Silvery Moon and On Moonlight Bay. She played similar roles in two later movies with Rosalind Russell: The Trouble with Angels and Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows in the mid 1960s.

Moving to the new medium of television in the 1950s, Wickes played the warm, yet jocular maid Katie in the Mickey Mouse Club serial Walt Disney Presents: Annette and regular roles in the sitcoms Make Room for Daddy and Dennis The Menace, as well as appearing as Emma the housekeeper in the holiday classic White Christmas (1954), starring Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen. She served as the live-action reference model for Cruella De Vil in Walt Disney film One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961),[3] and played Mrs. Squires in the film adaptation of Meredith Willson's The Music Man (1962).

In 1953, Wickes played the housekeeper, Martha, to Ezio Pinza's character in NBC's short-lived Bonino sitcom. Pinza portrayed an Italian-American opera singer trying to rear six children. Among the child actors on the program were Van Dyke Parks and Chet Allen.[4] In 1954-1955, she played Alice, the housekeeper to a college president, in the CBS sitcom The Halls of Ivy.

In the 1961-1962 season, she appeared as Maxfield with Gertrude Berg in CBS's Mrs. G. Goes to College. For her work in the sitcom, Wickes was nominated for an Emmy Award for "Outstanding Performance in a Supporting Role by an Actress".[5]

A longterm friend of Lucille Ball, Wickes played frequent guest roles in Ball's three CBS series, I Love Lucy, The Lucy Show andHere's Lucy. In 1970-1971, she guest starred on CBS's The Doris Day Show. (Day was another of her friends.) She was also a regular on the Sid and Marty Krofft children's television show Sigmund and the Sea Monsters, and the sitcom Doc. By the 1980s, her appearances in television series such as Our Man Higgins, M*A*S*H, The Love Boat, Kolchak: The Night Stalker and Murder, She Wrote had made her a widely recognizable character actress. She also appeared in a variety of Broadway shows, including a 1979 revival of Oklahoma!, where she portrayed Aunt Eller.

She was cast as Shirley MacLaine's character's mother in the 1990 film Postcards from the Edge and from 1989 to 1991, portrayed Marie Murkin in the television movie and series adaptations of Father Dowling Mysteries. She played Sister Mary Lazarus in Sister Act (1992) and in the sequel Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit (1993). She appeared in the 1994 film version of Little Women before she became ill.

She was hospitalized the following year suffering from numerous ailments, including renal failure, massive gastrointestinal bleeding, severe hypotension, ischemic cardiomyopathy, anemia and breast cancer (stage of cancer unknown), which cumulatively resulted in her death during surgery in 1995. Her final film role, voicing the gargoyle Laverne in the animated feature The Hunchback of Notre Dame was released posthumously in 1996. She was interred beside her parents at the Shiloh Valley Cemetery in Shiloh in St. Clair County in Illinois.

Although the nature of their relationship has been disputed, she was for many years the companion of playwright Abby Conrad. A registered Republican who never married, Wickes left a large estate and made a $2 million bequest, in memory of her parents, for the Isabella and Frank Wickenhauser Memorial Library Fund for Television, Film and Theater Arts.

In 2004, Wickes was inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame.

References

  1. ^ U.S. Census, 1920, State of Missouri, City of St. Louis, enumeration district 410, p. 18-B, family 470.
  2. ^ U.S. Census, 1880, State of Missouri, City of St. Louis, enumeration district 333, p. 160-A, family 147.
  3. ^ Maltin, Leonard (host). (2008). Walt Disney Treasures: The Mickey Mouse Club Presents Annette. [DVD]. Buena Vista Home Entertainment. 
  4. ^ IMDB, Bonino: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0045374/
  5. ^ IMDB, The Gertrude Berg Show, Emmy nominations: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054542/awards

Filmography

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