Constance Cummings
Constance Cummings, a star in film, on television, and onstage in both the U.S. and Britain, died of natural causes at a nursing home in Oxfordshire on November 23. She was 95.
Among the actress’ best-known work are the 1932 comedy Movie Crazy, in which she plays Harold Lloyd’s romantic interest; David Lean’s delightful 1945 film adaptation of the Noël Coward play Blithe Spirit, in which Cummings tries to cope with both untrustworthy husband Rex Harrison and the spirit of his former wife in the (ghostly) person of Kay Hammond; the drug-addicted matriarch in a 1971 National Theatre production of Eugene O’Neill’s autobiographical drama Long Day’s Journey into Night; and her Tony Award-winning tour de force as a former aviatrix recovering from a stroke in Wings.
The daughter of a lawyer and a concert soprano, she was born Constance Halverstadt in Seattle, Wash., on May 15, 1910. From an early age she wanted to be a classical dancer, but in her mid-teens, after a walk-on bit as a prostitute in a summer stock production of Seventh Heaven, she switched to acting and dancing in stage musicals. Around that time, she adopted her mother’s maiden name, Cummings, professionally.
In her 1928 Broadway debut, Constance Cummings was one of the girls in the chorus line of George and Ira Gershwin’s Treasure Girl, and then had a larger part the following year in the Arthur Schwartz-Howard Dietz revue Little Show. Shortly after playing the lead in This Man’s Town in 1930, she caught the attention of Hollywood mogul Samuel Goldwyn, who wanted to cast her opposite his top star, Ronald Colman, in the British-flavored 1930 comedy The Devil to Pay!.
Considering how British Cummings could sound in later years, it is ironic that, as per A. Scott Berg’s Goldwyn, she was dropped after ten days of filming "largely because of her strong American accent." (If so, Goldwyn’s replacement, seventeen-year-old Loretta Young of Salt Lake City, was an odd choice indeed.) Colman himself came to the rescue by persuading an agent to take Cummings as a client. A Columbia contract soon followed.
Her first film was The Criminal Code (1931), a badly dated melodrama directed by Howard Hawks, in which she plays the cute daughter of prison warden Walter Huston, falling in love with sweet-natured ex-con Phillips Holmes. A respected motion picture at the time, The Criminal Code earned screenwriters Seton I. Miller and Fred Niblo, Jr., an Academy Award nomination for Best Writing, Adaptation.
In the next four years, she would make a total of 20 more films, mostly for Columbia, in those days only a notch above the Poverty Row studios. Unsurprisingly, it was elsewhere that she found her most prestigious Hollywood film, Harold Lloyd’s semi-autobiographical Movie Crazy, a Paramount release. In 1999, Cummings said the film "was very funny it still is and unlike many of the other things I did, stood the test of time. Movie Crazy is what I’m best remembered for and what fans refer to the most. I did much better things but get a kick out of talking about the film and working with the genius that was Harold Lloyd."
Other notable titles during her early Hollywood years – all from 1932 – include the political dramedy Washington Merry-Go-Round, a precursor to the superior Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, with Lee Tracy at odds with corruption in the American capital; American Madness, a Frank Capra melodrama about the Depression, again playing opposite Walter Huston; and Night After Night (also at Paramount), starring George Raft, and best remembered as the film that introduced Mae West to the screen. In 1934, she had a supporting role in John Cromwell’s This Man Is Mine – Irene Dunne’s that is, though the conniving Cummings thinks otherwise in this conventional melo. (The man not quite worth fighting for is Ralph Bellamy.)
In 1933, she made two films in England – Channel Crossing and Heads We Go – reportedly while having to fight a lawsuit with Columbia. Cummings came out victorious and left the studio. But despite an appealing presence and a pretty face – "chic and charming even as a starlet," wrote film historian John Springer – her film career wasn’t progressing as one might have expected. In fact, in most of her early 1930s films her roles were merely decorative. By mid-decade, she had mostly been demoted to second leads.
England might prove to be a way out of the Hollywood doldrums. Around that time, she had met London playwright Benn W. Levy, then working as a Hollywood screenwriter (Waterloo Bridge, The Old Dark House, The Devil and the Deep). Following their marriage in 1933 (they would have two children), Cummings shifted her professional focus to the other side of the Atlantic. Whereas the British film industry lacked the prestige of even a B-list Hollywood studio, London’s theater scene was arguably the most respected in the world.
In 1934, after appearing on Broadway in Samson Raphaelson’s Accent on Youth, she traveled to London to star in the try-out of Sour Grapes, an American marital comedy by Vincent Lawrence that eventually made it to the West End. Two years later, she had the title roles in two of her husband’s stage adaptations produced on both sides of the Atlantic: Young Madame Conti, from the original by Bruno Frank, and Madame Bovary, from the Gustave Flaubert novel. Referring to the former performance, James Agate wrote that the American actress had made "a roaring success out of what in other hands might so easily have been an inarticulate, elegant flop."
Other stage roles in the mid-to-late ’30s included Nellie Blunt in If I Were You (1937), which she performed in New York; Katherine Chipping in Goodbye, Mr Chips, opposite Leslie Banks, in Shaftsbury; and the Levy play The Jealous God (1939), in the West End. When war broke out in late 1939, Cummings joined the Old Vic Company to play Juliet opposite Robert Donat’s Romeo, Miss Richland in Oliver Goldsmith’s Good-Natured Man, and the title role in George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan. Of her Juliet, she remarked, "I didn’t know how to read the verses. That was a sloppy thing. I should have had more sense." In fact, her Old Vic performances were generally considered below par.
Agate, however, remained an inveterate fan. Of her Katherine Chipping, he declared that the actress possessed "some of the fragrance and pathos, sensitiveness and radiance of the great actresses of our youth. What I want to know is where Miss Cummings has found the model for acting at once so uncommon and so little common."
Her flourishing theatrical career notwithstanding, Cummings remained a second-rate star as far as films were concerned. Her acclaimed stage roles were eventually played by other actresses on screen: Sylvia Sidney in Paramount’s version of Accent on Youth; Diana Wynyard in Let’s Try Again, RKO’s film adaptation of Sour Grapes; and Greer Garson in MGM’s British-made Goodbye, Mr. Chips.
Among Cummings’ sporadic film appearances during those years, the only one worth mentioning is probably her likable heroine in the British-made Seven Sinners (1936). In this effective Hitchcockian comedy-thriller, she plays the sophisticated sidekick to former silent-film star Edmund Lowe’s wisecracking American private eye.
Following a four-year absence from the screen, Cummings had her best film role to date in another comedy-thriller, the 1940 MGM production Busman’s Honeymoon / Haunted Honeymoon, a sort of The Thin Man with a British flavor. Shot in England, the film paired the actress with the studio’s leading debonair playboy, Robert Montgomery, who had been imported from the U.S. for that project. Unlike The Thin Man, however, the pleasant Busman’s Honeymoon did not lead to any sequels. During the war, Cummings performed both for the Allied troops and at the West End, including, in 1942, Sky Lark and The Petrified Forest. In the next five decades, she would continue to remain basically a stage actress.
Besides Busman’s Honeymoon, she only appeared in three other films in the 1940s: the 1941 morale-booster This England, co-starring with Emlyn Williams and John Clements; Charles Frend’s 1942 war thriller The Foreman Went to France, based on a true story; and what is probably her best known film role, the classy wife of conniving Rex Harrison in David Lean’s adaptation of Noël Coward’s play Blithe Spirit. Shot in color, this sophisticated comedy remains one of the best British films of the period. (By that time, Cummings had mastered a perfectly acceptable British accent.)
In the next three decades, Cummings’ stage reputation continue to grow on both sides of the Atlantic in plays as diverse as Don’t Listen Ladies (1948), with Denholm Elliott; Clifford Odets‘ Winter Journey (1952), as the worried wife of alcoholic actor Michael Redgrave; Joseph Kramm’s The Shrike (1953), opposite Sam Wanamaker, in a performance described by Kenneth Hurren as "a spiked knuckle duster in a velvet glove"; Noël Coward’s Fallen Angels, opposite Joan Greenwood; and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos (1962), as Inez, the ugly and inopportune lesbian. Initially horrified by Inez, Cummings grew to enjoy playing the part. "I found little seeds of her dreadfulness in myself," she declared. "Things I could build on. It was a marvelous liberation. I’d never opened myself before and taken such a plunge."
During that period, she also starred in plays, usually sophisticated comedies, written or directed by her husband. Among them, Clutterbuck (1946); Return to Tyassi (1950); The Rape of the Belt (1957), as Antiope in this adaptation of a Greek myth (that played in New York for one week in 1960); and Public and Confidential (1966), as an MP’s secretary-mistress – a "needle-sharp" performance, according to Eric Shorter in the Guardian obituary for the actress.
Among her rare film appearances in the 1950s and 1960s were two 1956 releases, The Intimate Stranger / Finger of Guilt, directed by the blacklisted Joseph Losey (under the pseudonym Joseph Walton), and a supporting role in William Fairchild’s John and Julie; also, the female lead – as a stop-at-nothing American businesswoman who drives Peter Sellers to murder (murder her, that is) – in Charles Crichton’s 1959 black comedy The Battle of the Sexes, with Robert Morley; and her last two feature films, both in 1963, Alexander Mackendrick’s children’s tale Sammy Going South / A Boy Ten Feet Tall, with Edward G. Robinson, and the misfire In the Cool of the Day, starring Peter Finch and Jane Fonda.
Other against-type roles on the stage included Martha in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1964), replacing Uta Hagen and battling Ray MacAnally onstage ("I shall never forget it," writes Shorter, "because I never supposed it possible. What Cummings did amid all the sound and fury was to hint at an element of feminine refinement"); Gertrude to Nicol Williamson’s Hamlet (1969) – replaced in the film version (also 1969) by Judy Parfitt; Mrs. Goforth in Tennessee Williams‘ The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Any More (1969); and Claire in Friedrich Durrenmatt’s The Visit (1970).
At the National Theatre in the early 1970s, then managed by Laurence Olivier, Cummings was cast as Volumnia in a production of Berthold Brecht’s adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Coriolanus (played by Anthony Hopkins); Leda in Amphitryon 38; and, what is perhaps considered her greatest theatrical performance, Mary Tyrone in Michael Blakemore’s revival of O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1971), playing opposite Olivier’s James Tyrone, Sr.
According to the [London] Telegraph obit, her Mary Tyrone "was a surprise not only because of her power to sustain such a challenging role, but also because she bridged the gap between the gentle, motherly woman who has apparently found a cure for her drug addiction and the closing scenes in which she tragically has not. Cummings here matched Olivier in theatrical power and surpassed him in pity." For her performance, she received a London Theatre Critics Best Actress Award.
Other stage performances, whether in London or elsewhere in Britain, Europe, and on Broadway, include her Mme. Ranyevskaya in Blakemore’s revival of The Cherry Orchard (1973), Agave in the Wole Soyinka version of The Bacchae, plus roles in W. Somerset Maugham’s The Circle, Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession, and, to great acclaim, in Arthur Kopit’s Wings, as a former aviatrix trying to recover from a stroke. When the play, under John Madden’s direction, opened on Broadway in 1979, Richard Eder wrote in the New York Times that Cummings’ star turn was "by far the most distinguished work to open on Broadway this season." The role brought her a Tony (shared with Carole Shelley in The Elephant Man), an Obie Award, and a Drama Desk Award.
Apparently indefatigable, in the mid-1990s Cummings was touring in Uncle Vanya which also happened to be her last West End performance, in 1996. Four years earlier, while appearing in The Chalk Garden, the 82-year-old actress had told the London Evening Standard, "I don’t remember things and names … but I don’t find it difficult to remember lines." (In her final years, Cummings’ memory was completely gone.)
Her television appearances date back to 1938, when she played in a BBC experimental production of Cyrano de Bergerac. In later years, she had guest roles in, among others, the series Jemima Shore Investigates; and had sizable parts in the TV productions of Love Song (1985), directed by Rodney Bennett, and Dead Man’s Folly (1986), an Agatha Christie tale directed by Clive Donner, and starring Peter Ustinov as Hercule Poirot. Additionally, performances of both Long Day’s Journey into Night and Wings were recorded for American television.
Following Benn Levy’s death in 1973 — he had become a Labour Member of Parliament after World War II — Cummings continued to run their 600-acre dairy farm in the village of Cote, Oxfordshire. A long-time supporter of the Actors’ Charitable Trust and the human-rights group Amnesty and Liberty, she was made a Commander of the British Empire the following year.
"When I look back on those old films," Constance Cummings once remarked, "I don’t feel it is a different person up there on the screen at all. It’s still me. I suppose in a way you always remain young inside."
I’d like to thank film historian Anthony Slide, who was friends with Constance Cummings, for his assistance.
Lauren Bacall and the 1997 Academy Awards
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