Actress Phyllis Thaxter, Superman's Mom, Dies at 90 - Hollywood Reporter

[Film Noir Press - Noir news from the internet]

Phyllis Thaxter, the wholesome actress who played Ma Kent in 1978’s Superman and the faithful girlfriend to vengeful POW Robert Ryan in the 1948 film noir classic Act of Violence, has died. She was 90.
•Obituaries

Thaxter died Tuesday at her home in Florida after a long bout with Alzheimer's, according to her daughter, actress Skye Aubrey.*
PHOTOS: Hollywood's Notable Deaths of 2012
A contract player at MGM and Warner Bros. in the 1940s and ’50s before her career was derailed by illness, Thaxter also starred in the psychological thriller Bewitched (1945), playing opposite Edmund Gwenn as a woman fighting to hold off a conniving, murderous alter ego.
“She was one of the most beautiful and patrician icons of the golden age of movies, TV and theater,” veteran movie critic Rex Reed told The Hollywood Reporter.
Born Nov. 20, 1921, in Portland, Maine, her mother was a former Shakespearean actress and her father a state Supreme Court justice. She joined the Montreal Repertory Theatre troupe as a teenager before graduating to Broadway. Appearing in such productions as Claudia and the 1940 drama There Shall Be No Night -- whose cast included Alfred Lunt,*Lynn Fontanne,*Sydney Greenstreet and Montgomery Clift -- Thaxter attracted the attention of Hollywood and signed with MGM in the early '40s.
Her film debut came in Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944) as the wife of Van Johnson. A year later, she starred in Bewitched and then appeared in*Week-End at the Waldorf, a remake of the Greta Garbo classic Grand Hotel.
The hazel-eyed brunette followed with The Sea of Grass (1947), opposite Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn; Tenth Avenue Angel (1948) with Margaret O’Brien; Blood on the Moon, a Western with Robert Mitchum; and Fred Zinneman’s taut*Act of Violence (1948), as the woman who stands by Ryan, an embittered POW out for revenge against his former war buddy Van Heflin.
Thaxter then joined Warner Bros. and appeared in such films as Michael Curtiz'sThe Breaking Point (1950) with John Garfield and Patricia Neal;*Come Fill the Cup (1951) with Gig Young;*Springfield Rifle (1952) with Gary Cooper;*another Curtiz film,*Jim Thorpe — All-American (1951), with Burt Lancaster;*and*She’s Working Her Way Through College (1952) with Ronald Reagan.*However, she contracted a form of infantile paralysis while visiting her family in Portland, Maine, and her contract was terminated.
That led Thaxter to television, where she appeared in guest-starring roles in Lux Video Theatre, Climax!, Wagon Train, Rawhide, The Defenders, Medical Center,*Marcus Welby, M.D. and many other series.



In 1978, Thaxter made one final movie splash when she was cast along with Glenn Ford*as Clark Kent’s adoptive parents on Earth in Richard Donner’s Superman, starring Christopher Reeve. Her daughter Skye*was married to Superman executive producer Iiya Salkind.
“I worked harder on that film than anything I’d done — I couldn’t be bad,” Thaxter once said.
The actress, who has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, spent the 1980s on the stage in such productions as The Little Foxes with Anne Baxter and The Gin Game with Larry Gates.
In 1944, Thaxter married James Aubrey Jr., who was president of CBS in the early 1960s and then was hired by Kirk Kerkorian to preside over MGM during a brutal budget-slashing period in the '70s. They divorced in 1962 (he died in 1994). Thaxter then wed former Princeton football star Gilbert Lea, a marriage that lasted for*46 years until his death in May 2008.
E-mail: mike.barnes@thr.com
Twitter: @mikebarnes4



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[Steve-O]

RIP

Phyllis Thaxter in Bewiched

[Steve-O]

Act of Violence


she's also in the bleak western-noir Blood on the Moon


(she's about 2:30 into the clip)

[Surly]

Thaxter also had a split-personality in Arch Oboler's weird and wacky Bewitched (1945), was replaced by Barbara Stanwyck in No Man of Her Own (1950), was pushed beyond The Breaking Point (1950), and ended up in Women's Prison (1955). On television Thaxter appeared in a number of episodes of both Climax! and Alfred Hitchcock Presents.



Bewitched

[David Boxwell]

She was just wonderful in ACT OF VIOLENCE (48).

[Film Noir Press - Noir news from the internet]

*
Phyllis Diller deserved all the press she got last week (a front-page New York Times obit!),*after her*Aug. 20 death at the age of 95.
But the pioneering female comic with the fright wig and the hyena cackle wasn't the only show-business Phyllis to leave fans bereft this month. Phyllis Thaxter -- inevitably referred to as "Superman's mother," thanks to her small role as Ma Kent in the 1978 Christopher Reeve movie -- died Aug. 14 at 92.
*
An attractive but unglamorous young*stage actress, Thaxter was*publicized as a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer discovery when she made her movie debut as Van Johnson's wife in the wartime hit "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo" (1944). Domesticity would define her movie career, but before she was straitjacketed in apron strings she sunk her teeth into one of the stranger MGM releases of the 1940s, a psychological thriller about dual personality that wears several faces: It's a*"woman's picture," a film noir, a courtroom drama*and even a horror movie.
*
Anticipating "The Three Faces of Eve," the hit 1957 film that "popularized" multiple personality disorder,*"Bewitched" (1945) was Thaxter's second movie, and a rare starring role; she'd never have another lead part as complex or unusual. Few actresses would: "Bewitched" allows Thaxter to stab a man with scissors, to twist her face*with demonic lust, and*to run through dark backlot streets in a vain attempt to outrace the chant in her head: "Crazy... crazy... crazy..."


Written and directed by Arch Oboler, whose scary*"Lights Out!" radio program made him a sort of Rod Serling of the pre-television era, "Bewitched" recently was rescued from obscurity by the folks in charge of the estimable Warner Archive Collection, the "classic movie" arm of Warner Home Entertainment that is devoted to bringing previously unavailable titles to manufactured-on-demand disc and digital download. The only bonus feature on the disc is the movie's original trailer, testimony to the short-lived effort to make Thaxter a movie star: The trailer promises "Phyllis Thaxter in an outstanding dramatic role... Surpasses her superb performance in 'Thirty Seconds over Tokyo.'"
**
Based on Oboler's original radio drama, "Alter Ego"*(Bette Davis was the star of the broadcast, in a sort of premonition of the "horror hag" roles that would revive her career), the low-budget*"Bewitched" opens with a nighttime image*of a tower clock,*its tick tick tick accompanied by*the voice of an omniscient narrator with a*message that has lost none of its validity. "The world suddenly has become as small as the house we live in," the voice says, "and each person in this house is one of us." The*narrator -- Oboler? God? -- reiterates this theme*at the end of the film: "In a war-torn world, (one woman's) happiness may seem of small importance, and yet it is of importance, for each person in this world is one of us."

The happiness in question is that of Joan Ellis (Thaxer), a young woman who "on the surface" appears "thoroughly normal." Of course, if she were "normal," she wouldn't be the protagonist in an Arch Oboler drama: Joan is on death row, having been convicted of murder. "In 59 minutes, the clock would strike for her,"*announces the voice, as it introduces our heroine. "She would be dead."*
*
We soon learn that Joan's name was not chosen by Oboler at random: Like Joan of Arc, Joan Ellis hears a voice inside her head, but*this voice*seems more demonic than divine.*The soundtrack, too, echoes with disembodied voices, as Joan's story is told in flashback by various narrators, including an unseen newspaper reporter and a sympathetic psychologist (Edmund Gwenn), working against the clock to win her a stay of execution.
*
The flashback begins at an engagement party in a*handsome home in an all-American town. Joan is due to be married, but only she knows that her blandly handsome and likable fiancé (Henry H. Daniels Jr.) is*stepping into a sort of*threesome, thanks to the other personality inside Joan's head, who calls herself Karen (and whose menacing voiceover is contributed by film noir queen Audrey Totter). "I've been fighting with you all my life," says Karen, in*a somewhat raspy tone*that may remind viewers of the diabolical voice Mercedes McCambridge contrived for "The Exorcist" (1973). "I've been in the dark so long... You've got to let me live." True to the name of his radio program, Oboler dims the light when Karen is "present," to suggest*an almost*literal eclipse of Joan's personality. (Of course, a woman's identity may be eclipsed by more than mental illness, as Oboler demonstrates when Joan's*face is obscured by her boyfriend when they kiss in the park.) *Elsewhere, the*noirish visuals*-- pools of darkness, doorways and other frames -- prophesy*the entrapment that becomes fact after Joan's arrest.

The sexual nature of Joan's torment is an echo of the dilemma faced by Simone Simon in producer Val Lewton's*"Cat People" (1942); the relationship between the films*is all but*acknowledged*when Joan and her boyfriend stop in front of*a tiger's cage during a trip to the zoo. "You never know what's going on inside," says the boyfriend, observing the tiger's*apparently exterior. This Lewtonesque theme*is reinforced when Joan -- fearful of Karen's emergence -- flees her*hometown for the big city, where she finds herself attracted to a lawyer who is more mature and masculine (i.e., sexual) then her boyish fiancé. (Sex*also rears its head when*Joan is all but propositioned on the street by a sleazy masher.) It's this arousal that awakens the feral, apparently sexually*hungry Karen, leading to tragedy -- and the movie's rather dull final act, which is nonetheless fascinating for its dated*theorizing and surprisingly forgiving attitude toward Joan's crime. (A sympathetic viewer might say*that "Bewitched"*dramatizes the sickness of a society that*disavows and represses female sexuality; non-fans might say the movie offers yet another warning that sexual women are unwholesome and dangerous -- an interpretation given weight by the movie's title.)

In 1951, Oboler wrote and directed "Five," an excellent low-budget post-apocalypse film, motivated by*fear of the atom bomb; in 1952, he jumpstarted the 3D craze with his smash hit "Bwana Devil." Those movies were inspired by developments in science and technology, and so, in its own way, is "Bewitched." Joan's dual personality is not explained as a mental illness that will require perhaps a lifetime of uncertain treatment but as a*sort of rare birth defect. Joan, the psychologist asserts, was born with a second personality, and this*unhealthy personality must be eliminated, the way a doctor might amputate a sixth toe.
*
"Bewitched" was not the only film of its era about "crazy" people. As awareness of psychology and psychotherapy increased, so did Hollywood's exploitation of the*mysteries of*"the mind."*Horror and crime films*with psychological themes*were popular in the 1940s,*as demonstrated by "Hangover Square"; the Universal "Inner Sanctum" series with Lon Chaney Jr.; the "Freudian" version of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," with Spencer Tracy; Hitchcock's "Spellbound"; and Otto Preminger's "Whirlpool," to cite*just a few examples.*With its explicit presentation of schizophrenia, "Bewitched" goes beyond those films, to anticipate the likes of*"Psycho" and William Castle's*"Homicidal." (Like Oboler, "gimmick" king Castle was a master of provocative ideas whose movies always contain at least a few striking images.) "Bewitched" is no masterpiece, but it's a rough gem, worthy of admiration.



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