Ann Sothern: Actress in Maisie movie series enjoyed two Hollywood career peaks. Ann Sothern, an actress in Hollywood and, somewhat briefly, on Broadway since the late 1920s, became a star in 1939, courtesy of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s Edwin L. Marin-directed low-budget comedy Maisie. That led to the first of two moderately sized peaks in Sothern’s career, when she was seen in A musicals like Lady Be Good and Panama Hattie, and the all-star war drama Cry ‘Havoc’. Though less commercially successful, her second career peak took place at the end of the decade, when Ann Sothern, having left the Maisie series, was featured in another cluster of A productions, among them the MGM musicals Words and Music and Nancy Goes to Rio, and 20th Century Fox’s Oscar-winning drama A Letter to Three Wives.
See previous post about actress Ann Sothern: “Ann Sothern: Cheerfully Brazen Blonde Enjoyed Unusual + Long-Lasting Hollywood Career.”
Actress Ann Sothern career highlight: ‘A Letter to Three Wives’
Notwithstanding her long association with MGM, the critical highlight of Ann Sothern’s Hollywood career was a 20th Century Fox release: screenwriter-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s A Letter to Three Wives (1949), a more compact version of John Klempner’s 1945 novel A Letter to Five Wives.[1]
In the romantic drama, Sothern and Fox stars Jeanne Crain and Linda Darnell are three women who receive a letter from an unseen vixen (with Celeste Holm’s voice) claiming that she has run off with one of their husbands.
But which one? Jeffrey Lynn? Kirk Douglas? Movie newcomer Paul Douglas?
Contemplative recollections of the women’s strained marriages ensue.
Oscar-winning career highlight
The year’s Best Picture Academy Award winner was Robert Rossen’s political drama All the King’s Men, but A Letter to Three Wives did earn Mankiewicz, in Hollywood since the dawn of the sound era, double Academy Awards for his direction and screenplay (from an initial adaptation by Vera Caspary) – a feat he would repeat in the succeeding year with Best Picture winner All About Eve.
Curiously, only two A Letter to Three Wives actors received Academy Award nominations: Jeanne Crain and Kirk Douglas – but for their work in, respectively, Elia Kazan’s race drama Pinky and Mark Robson’s boxing drama Champion. In fact, unlike All About Eve, which seemed to have just about every cast member shortlisted for Oscars, A Letter to Three Wives failed to garner a single nod in the acting categories.
Of note, almost four decades after A Letter to Three Wives came out, Ann Sothern would be briefly seen in the now largely forgotten 1985 made-for-TV remake. Larry Elikann directed Loni Anderson, Michelle Lee, and Stephanie Zimbalist as the titular missive recipients.
‘Shadow on the Wall’: End of stardom
The first narrative feature directed by London-born Pat Jackson – whose career would be more fruitful on the other side of the North Atlantic (e.g., White Corridors, The Gentle Touch) – the psychological thriller Shadow on the Wall (1950) features Zachary Scott as a man convicted of murdering his wife. The only witness to the crime is the couple’s young daughter (Gigi Perreau), who has been so traumatized by the event that she can’t recall what she actually saw.
Enter psychiatrist Nancy Davis (later Nancy Reagan) who believes in the man’s innocence, suspecting instead that his sister-in-law, top-billed Ann Sothern, is the guilty party. But is she?
A low-budget production ($701,000), Shadow on the Wall was a flop all the same ($330,000 loss) – MGM’s fourth consecutive Ann Sothern movie to end up in the red, following the final Maisie entry, Undercover Maisie (1947, $142,000 loss); the Richard Rodgers-Lorenz Hart musical biopic Words and Music (1948, $371,000), with Sothern in what amounts to a supporting role but as one of the seven stars billed above the title; and Nancy Goes to Rio ($52,000).
After going steady with at least one new movie per year (excepting 1945[2]) for nearly two decades, Ann Sothern’s big-screen career came to an abrupt halt in 1950. As it turned out, Nancy Goes to Rio and Shadow on the Wall marked the end of both her association with MGM and her film stardom.
Ann Sothern in Crazy Mama. At a time when most of her contemporaries – especially the women – were no longer around, Ann Sothern remained a relatively active film actress in the 1960s and 1970s. During that period, she was seen in nine releases, notably the political drama The Best Man, which earned her a Golden Globe nomination; the thrillers Lady in a Cage and The Killing Kind (in the latter, she has the female lead); the actioners Golden Needles and Crazy Mama; and the horror drama The Manitou. From the mid-1970s on, Ann Sothern’s cinematic output had to be curtailed following an accident while performing on stage in Florida, but there would still be one noteworthy entry in the 1980s: The Whales of August, for which Sothern scored her one and only Oscar nomination.
Television resurgence: ‘Private Secretary’ & ‘The Ann Sothern Show’
As a consequence of social, economic, and political upheavals, the American film industry was going through challenging times in the early 1950s. One of the consequences of that was the scarcity of movie jobs for older actresses – in the case of Ann Sothern, not helping matters was a life-threatening bout of hepatitis that left her out of commission for long stretches.
A return to Broadway in fall 1951 proved unsuccessful. Directed by Richard Whorf and co-starring Hollywood import Robert Cummings, Faithfully Yours, an adaptation of French screenwriter/playwright Jean-Bernard Luc’s 1950 marital comedy Le Complexe de Philémon, lasted 68 performances.
In 1953, after a three-year absence, Sothern was back on the big screen, supporting Anne Baxter and Richard Conte – but with star billing and her scene-abducting capabilities intact (“I know I’m a little slow, Nora. I was a late baby”) – in Fritz Lang’s Warner Bros.-distributed film noir The Blue Gardenia. Her next big-screen comeback would take place more than a decade later.
That’s in large part because Ann Sothern was kept busy on television, mainly in two hit series: Private Secretary (1953–1957), which earned her four Emmy nominations (and which earned producer Jack Chertok a $93,000 lawsuit brought on by his star over her percentage of the profits), and The Ann Sothern Show (1958–1961), which led to a fifth – and final – Emmy nod, in addition to a Golden Globe win.
From gracious earthiness to ungainly frumpiness
In the 1960s and 1970s, by then no longer the classy/brassy beauty of decades past, Ann Sothern would make sporadic returns to feature films, usually in supporting roles as blowsy, loutish hags. Examples include:
- An aging sex worker and petty criminal in Walter Grauman’s psychological thriller Lady in a Cage (1964), starring Olivia de Havilland in the title role.
- A loud-mouthed political operative in Franklin J. Schaffner’s exposé The Best Man (1964). Variety remarked, “Of the three females involved [Edie Adams and Margaret Leighton were the other two], Ann Sothern has the meatiest part … and makes the most of it.” Though bypassed for the Academy Awards, The Best Man earned Sothern her only Golden Globe nomination for her work in feature films.
- Cloris Leachman’s trashy mother and fellow desperada in Jonathan Demme’s early directorial effort Crazy Mama (1974).
One notable lead that came Ann Sothern’s way was that of John Savage’s doting/disturbed mom in The Killing Kind (1973), a Curtis Harrington thriller that pitted the filmmaker against his star, as he felt the movie veteran was purposely stealing scenes from her relatively inexperienced fellow actor.
‘The Whales of August’: First Oscar nomination for last big-screen performance
In 1974, while appearing on stage in John Patrick’s Everybody Loves Opal in Jacksonville, Florida, Ann Sothern suffered serious injuries after a fake tree fell on her back, leaving her unable to work for extended periods. From then on, she would require a cane to move around.
Sothern was seen in only three more big-screen features after the accident: William Girdler’s horror cult classic The Manitou (1978), Curtis Hanson’s action comedy The Little Dragons (1979), and, after nearly a decade away, Lindsay Anderson’s elegiac comedy-drama The Whales of August (1987).
A lukewarmly received meditation on old age, The Whales of August is chiefly noteworthy for its cast: Lillian Gish and Bette Davis as two sisters spending their final years in a small town in Maine, Vincent Price as a former Russian aristocrat, and Ann Sothern as the sisters’ cheery neighbor – the sort of old dame Maisie Ravier might have turned into had she retired to New England.
Somewhat surprisingly, Sothern, at age 79 and in show business for nearly six decades, was the only cast member to receive an Academy Award nomination – thus becoming the fifth oldest nominee ever in the acting categories. She lost the Best Supporting Actress Oscar to Olympia Dukakis for Moonstruck.
Once again in the public eye, she told the New York Times, “I’m exactly like my grandmother. She lived to be 93. She never gave up. They pulled the sheet over her three times and she pulled it down.”
The Whales of August turned out to be Ann Sothern’s final film. She died at age 92 in March 2001 in Ketchum, Idaho, where for some time she owned a cattle ranch.
Ann Sothern in A Letter to Three Wives with Jeanne Crain: Scenes from three marriages in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s double Oscar-winning 1949 classic. One of the relatively few movies to give Ann Sothern the chance to display her abilities as a dramatic actress – and, easily, the most prestigious motion picture of her six-decade Hollywood career – 20th Century Fox’s A Letter to Three Wives features the MGM star as a professionally oriented radio soap opera writer at odds with schoolteacher husband Kirk Douglas, who suffers from Macho Anxiety Syndrome because his wife’s paycheck is much bigger than his own.
‘A Letter to Three Wives’ stellar would-be cast
[1] Before the downsizing of A Letter to Five Wives, 20th Century Fox announced in 1946 that Alice Faye, Linda Darnell, Gene Tierney, Maureen O’Hara, and Dorothy McGuire would be cast as the female leads. Tyrone Power was also listed as a possibility for one of the male characters.
Once the adaptation was finished, one wife had been taken out. By mid-1948, further tweaking led to the removal of another wife. And thus Anne Baxter – who was to have been the fourth wife alongside Jeanne Crain, Linda Darnell, and Ann Sothern – was gone from A Letter to Three Wives.
Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s claim that Joan Crawford wanted to do the voice of the unseen letter writer sounds like a joke to get Best Supporting Actress Oscar winner Celeste Holm (Gentleman’s Agreement, 1947) to accept the faceless gig.
Tisha Sterling & mid-1940s career slowdown
[2] Ann Sothern’s daughter, future actress Tisha Sterling (Valley of the Giants, Coogan’s Bluff), was born in December 1944.
Looks like Sterling’s birth drastically slowed down Sothern’s movie career, which had been averaging three to four movies per year. In 1945, she was totally gone from the screen; in 1944, 1946, and 1947, she was seen in only one quickly made Maisie movie per year.
Notably, Tisha Sterling plays her real-life mother’s youthful self in a “decades earlier” prologue in The Whales of August.
Best Supporting Actress nominee Ann Sothern: Among the Oscars’ oldest
Back when Ann Sothern received her first and only Academy Award nomination for The Whales of August – the Oscars were turning 60 at the 1988 ceremony – the only four older performers to have been previously shortlisted in the acting categories had been:
- Edith Evans, 80, shortlisted as Best Actress for The Whisperers (1967).
- George Burns, 80, won Best Supporting Actor for The Sunshine Boys (1975).
- Eva Le Gallienne, 82, shortlisted as Best Supporting Actress for Resurrection (1980).
- Ralph Richardson, 82, shortlisted as Best Supporting Actor for Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan Lord of the Apes (1984).
In the past three decades, the list of elderly Oscar nominees has grown exponentially. Sothern would now be no. 19, while Eva Le Gallienne and Ralph Richardson wouldn’t even be included among the top five.
Ann Sothern in Nancy Goes to Rio with Louis Calhern: Lively actress was featured in 70-odd motion pictures. During the course of her six-decade big-screen career, fans of actress Ann Sothern usually had the choice of either seeing her in subpar fare or not seeing her at all. MGM’s 1950 musical comedy Nancy Goes to Rio, a Joe Pasternak production directed by veteran Robert Z. Leonard, may be more enjoyable than most releases in the genre; yet on a scale from commonplace to exceptional, this bit of fluff, like most of Pasternak’s output, lies much closer to the former. Although Ann Sothern was seen in three films supervised by the more prestigious Arthur Freed – Lady Be Good, Panama Hattie, Words and Music – her talents remained mostly untapped during the heyday of the MGM musical in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Actress Ann Sothern movies: TCM schedule (EDT)
6:00 AM WALKING ON AIR (1936). Dir.: Joseph Santley. Cast: Gene Raymond. Jessie Ralph. B&W-70m.
7:30 AM THERE GOES MY GIRL (1937). Dir.: Ben Holmes. Cast: Gene Raymond. Gordon Jones. B&W-74m.
9:00 AM MAISIE (1939). Dir.: Edwin L. Marin. Cast: Robert Young. Ruth Hussey. B&W-75m.
10:30 AM CONGO MAISIE (1940). Dir.: Henry C. Potter. Cast: John Carroll. Rita Johnson. B&W-71m.
12:00 PM GOLD RUSH MAISIE (1940). Dir.: Edwin L. Marin. Cast: Lee Bowman. Virginia Weidler. B&W-82m.
1:30 PM MAISIE WAS A LADY (1941). Dir.: Edwin L. Marin. Cast: Lew Ayres. Maureen O’Sullivan. B&W-79m.
3:00 PM RINGSIDE MAISIE (1941). Dir.: Edwin L. Marin. Cast: George Murphy. Robert Sterling. Virginia O’Brien. B&W-95m.
5:00 PM SHADOW ON THE WALL (1950). Dir.: Pat Jackson. Cast: Zachary Scott. Gigi Perreau. B&W-84m.
6:30 PM THE BLUE GARDENIA (1953). Dir.: Fritz Lang. Cast: Anne Baxter. Richard Conte. B&W-88m.
8:00 PM A LETTER TO THREE WIVES (1948). Dir.: Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Cast: Jeanne Crain. Linda Darnell. B&W-103m.
10:00 PM CRY ‘HAVOC’ (1943). Dir.: Richard Thorpe. Cast: Margaret Sullavan. Joan Blondell. Fay Bainter. Ella Raines. Marsha Hunt. B&W-97m.
12:00 AM THE WHALES OF AUGUST (1987). Dir.: Lindsay Anderson. Cast: Bette Davis. Lillian Gish. Vincent Price. C-91m.
2:00 AM NANCY GOES TO RIO (1950). Dir.: Robert Z. Leonard. Cast: Jane Powell. Barry Sullivan. Carmen Miranda. Louis Calhern. Scotty Beckett. C-100m.
4:00 AM APRIL SHOWERS (1948). Dir.: James V. Kern. Cast: Jack Carson. Robert Alda. B&W-94m.
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Margie Schultz’s Ann Sothern: A Bio-bibliography was key source for this two-part article on Hollywood actress Ann Sothern.
The Joan Crawford/A Letter to Three Wives claim is found in Kenneth L. Geist’s Pictures Will Talk: The Life & Films of Joseph L. Mankiewicz.
The Killing Kind filmmaker Curtis Harrington discussed his issue with actress Ann Sothern during conversations with the author of this post.
Actress Ann Sothern movies’ cast info via the IMDb.
Jeanne Crain and Ann Sothern A Letter to Three Wives image: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
Louis Calhern and Ann Sothern Nancy Goes to Rio image: MGM.
Actress Ann Sothern Crazy Mama image: New World Pictures.
Turner Classic Movies website.
“Ann Sothern: Actress Went from Maisie Movie Series to Becoming One of Oldest Oscar Nominees” last updated in October 2019.