Rosalind Russell (June 4, 1907 – November 28, 1976) was a four-time Academy
Award nominated and Tony Award winning American film and stage actress, perhaps best known for her role
as a fast-talking newspaper reporter in the Howard Hawks screwball comedy
His Girl Friday.
She is the actress (tied with Meryl Streep) with the most Golden Globe Awards (for films) wins, with five. It is notable that she won every Golden Globe for
which she was nominated.
Early life
Rosalind Russell was one of seven siblings born in Waterbury, Connecticut to
Clara and James Edward Russell,[1] an Irish-American Catholic family. She was not named after
the character from Shakespeare's As You Like
It, but rather after the ship on which her parents had travelled. She attended Catholic schools before attending the
American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City.
Career
She started her career as a fashion model and was in many Broadway shows. In the
early 1930s, she began to work for MGM, where she starred in many comedies, such as
Forsaking All Others (1934) and Four's a
Crowd (1938), as well as dramas, including Craig's Wife (1936) and
The Citadel (1938). In 1939, she was cast as a catty gossip in the all-female
comedy The Women, directed by George Cukor.
She proved her quick-witted talent for comedy in the classic screwball comedy
His Girl Friday (1940), directed by Howard
Hawks. She played a quick-witted ace reporter who was also the ex-wife of her former newspaper editor (played by
Cary Grant).
In the 1940s, she continued to make both comedies such as The Feminine Touch (1941) and
Take a Letter Darling (1942), dramas like Sister
Kenny (1946) and Mourning Becomes Electra (1947), and a
murder mystery The Velvet Touch (1948).
Russell scored a big hit on Broadway with her Tony Award-winning performance in
Wonderful Town in 1953. The play was a musical
version of her successful film of a decade earlier, My Sister Eileen. Russell
reprised her starring role in the musical version in 1958 in a television special.
Probably her most memorable performance was in the title role of the long-running stage hit Auntie Mame (1956) and the subsequent movie version (1958),
in which she played an eccentric aunt whose orphan nephew comes to live with her. When asked which role she was most closely
identified with, she replied that strangers who spotted her still called out, "Hey, Auntie Mame!"
From the late 1950s to the mid-1960s, she starred in a large number of movies, giving notable performances in
Picnic (1956), Gypsy (1962) and
The Trouble with Angels (1966).
Russell was the logical choice for reprising her role as "Auntie Mame" when its Broadway musical adaptation
Mame was set for production in 1966. She claimed to have turned it down since she preferred
to move on to different roles. In reality, she did not want to burden the public with her growing health problems, which included
rheumatoid arthritis.
Rosalind Russell has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, at 1708 Vine
Street.
Personal life
She married Danish-American producer Frederick Brisson on
October 25, 1941. Fred was often referred to in Hollywood as
"The Lizard of Roz" due to his habit of getting choice Broadway play roles for the movie to be played by his wife Roz. They had
one child in 1943, a son named Lance. Her father-in-law was the successful Danish actor Carl
Brisson.
Russell died after a long battle with breast cancer in 1976 at the age of 69, although initially her age was misreported because she had shaved a few years off her true
age. She was survived by her husband and son. She is buried in Holy Cross
Catholic Cemetery in Culver City, California.
Her autobiography, written with Chris Chase, entitled Life is a Banquet was published a
year after her death. In the foreword (written by her husband), he states that Russell had a nervous breakdown sometime in the
early 1940s. Details are scant, but it indicates that her health problems can be traced back to the 1940s.
Filmography
Features
Short subject
- The Candid Camera Story (Very Candid) of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures 1937 Convention (1937)
- March of Time: The Movies Move On (1939)
- March of Time: The Movies Move On (1939)
- You Can't Fool a Camera (1941)
- Screen Snapshots: 25th Anniversary (1945)
- Screen Snapshots: Famous Hollywood Mothers (1947)
Footnotes
External links
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