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The Guardian (09/Mar/2005) - Obituary: Teresa Wright

(c) The Guardian (09/Mar/2005)

Teresa Wright

Hollywood star with a tenacious spirit, on and off the screen

'You're just an ordinary little girl living in an ordinary little town," says Joseph Cotten's Uncle Charlie in Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow Of A Doubt (1943). His niece and namesake Charlie, played by Teresa Wright, who has died aged 86, replies: "Oh, I don't know. I guess I don't like to be an average girl in an average family."

Though, on the surface, many of the characters Wright played appeared to be just sweet and pretty girl-next-door types, their simple exteriors usually covered a tenacious temperament.

Hitchcock thought Wright was one of the most intelligent actors he had worked with, and brought out her vivacity and warmth, not epithets generally associated with Hitch's heroines. In Shadow Of A Doubt, she exudes youthful idealism in her worship of her suave uncle, though this turns to disillusion when she discovers he is the "merry widow murderer" and defiantly threatens to expose him at the risk of her own life.

Wright is equally courageous as paraplegic Marlon Brando's fiancée in Fred Zinnemann's The Men (1950), helping him to live as normal a life as possible. In The Pride Of The Yankees (1942), she is Eleanor Gehrig, wife of dying baseball legend Lou Gehrig (Gary Cooper). At the end of the film, he leaves the baseball ground, and gropes through the gloom to his wife, waiting in the sunshine at the end of the tunnel. Few actors could embody such determination, fidelity and purity.

The New York-born Wright's arrival in Hollywood caused a stir, not because of her star power but because of an unprecedented clause Samuel Goldwyn agreed to write into her contract.

It said that she "shall not be required to pose for photographs in a bathing suit unless she is in water. Neither may she be photographed running on the beach with her hair flying in the wind. Nor may she pose in any of the following situations: in shorts; playing with a cocker spaniel; digging in a garden; whipping up a meal; attired in firecrackers and holding skyrockets for the fourth of July; looking insinuatingly at the turkey for Thanksgiving; wearing a bunny cap with long ears for Easter; twinkling on prop snow in a skiing outfit while a fan blows her scarf."

Goldwyn signed Wright to a long-term contract after seeing her on Broadway in 1939 in Life With Father. As Mary Skinner (the part taken by the young Elizabeth Taylor in the film version), the 21-year-old Wright played "a refreshingly pretty small-town girl of 16". A year earlier, she had understudied Martha Scott in New York in the archetypal small-town play, Our Town, by Thornton Wilder, the screenwriter of Shadow Of A Doubt.

Wright's screen debut came in William Wyler's The Little Foxes (1941), the excellent film adaptation of Lillian Hellman's stage play. As Alexandra Giddens, the daughter of the vixenish Regina (Bette Davis), Wright more than held her own, and was nominated for an Oscar as best supporting actress.

She won the award the following year for Mrs Miniver, in which she played Greer Garson's aristocratic, but democratic, daughter-in-law. In this wartime drama, about an English family trying to maintain normal life during the Battle of Britain, Wright is killed by a bomb, though her spirit hangs over the rest of the film.

In Wyler's The Best Years Of Our Lives (1946), a moving portrait of postwar America, she played returning veteran Fredric March's daughter. She was rather more complex as Robert Mitchum's adoptive sister and wife in Pursued (1947), Raoul Walsh's brilliant psychological western, which was written by Wright's first husband Niven Busch. They married in 1942, and were divorced 10 years later.

As she entered her 30s, Wright, always attractive but never seen as glamorous, was offered parts of rather plain women in less interesting films - with notable exceptions such as The Men. "I chose to do The Men for $25,000," she once explained. "Your importance was determined by how much money you made. The Men was a flop, and I never again achieved the kind of status I had with my first few films."

In George Cukor's The Actress (1953), Wright played Jean Simmons's mother (though, in life, she was only 10 years her senior), who secretly supports her daughter's theatrical ambitions against the wishes of her husband (Spencer Tracy). She was also the spinster sister of Mitchum in William Wellman's Track Of The Cat (1954).

Wright retired from the screen in 1959, when she married playwright Robert Anderson. (They divorced, remarried and divorced again, though they always remained friends.) Before returning to the screen in 1969 in various supporting roles - for instance, playing the mother of hippie Michael Douglas in his debut feature Hail Hero! - Wright did some stage work, including an acclaimed performance as Linda Loman (opposite George C Scott) in the 1975 New York revival of Death Of A Salesman.

Of her later films, she was most memorable in James Ivory's Roseland (1977). In the first and slightest of the three stories set in New York's famous ballroom, Wright played a newly widowed woman whose dancing partner is an uncouth widower (Lou Jacobi). Pauline Kael wrote of her performance: "You can't relax when she's on the screen - she's reaching out, grabbing you, pelting you with her tender frailty."

One of Wright's last films was Francis Coppola's The Rainmaker (1997), in which she was outstanding as Miss Birdie. A year earlier, she had appeared at the Edinburgh film festival, talking enlighteningly about that most famous role in Shadow Of A Doubt.

She is survived by Anderson, and a son and daughter from her marriage to Busch.

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