Actress Theresa Wright (1918-2005), gained unusual clout in the early stages of her distinguished career when she insisted on a most unusual clause in her 1941 contract with Samuel Goldwyn.
Goldwyn, a talented, but hard-headed Hollywood producer, desperately wanted Wright under contract, and so he swallowed his pride and allowed Wright’s clause to stand.
But he never forgave her effrontery and ended their relationship in 1948.
Wright insisted on being normal. She was a serious actress, and a serious person. Muriel Teresa Wright knew who she was and never allowed herself to undergo a glamorous transformation like so many other young starlets—Ava Gardner, Lana Turner, Rita Hayworth—which led to stardom, but which, arguably, contributed to unhappy, unfulfilled personal lives.
In Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943) Teresa Wright plays teenager Charlie Newton, who adores her namesake, Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten), unaware that he is a serial killer of rich women. The gradual realization of uncle Charlie’s true nature is reflected in one of the actress’s most moving performances.
The height of Wright’s normalcy was in her quiet, dignified performance in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) the deeply moving film about soldiers returning from the war. Wright did not have the biggest role in the movie, but she was central because she represented normalcy, the extraordinary ordinary decency for which the men were fighting and to which they yearned to return.
The clause Wright inserted into her Goldwyn contract reads:
The aforementioned Teresa Wright shall not be required to pose for photographs in a bathing suit unless she is in the water. Neither may she be photographed on the beach with 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 sky rockets for the Fourth of July; looking insinuatingly at a 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; or assuming an athletic stance while pretending to hit something with a bow and arrow.
Karen and I wish all our friends and relatives a lovely and normal Shabbat.
When I was younger I had a crush on Teresa Wright. I didn’t know she was old enough to be my mother.
The clause is clever and witty. Quite charming.
Sure, but as charming and likable as she was, a ‘hot babe’ she was not. The bathing suit stuff, wishful thinking. Not an issue.
The same might be said of this non-“hot babe,” yet Hollywood seemed to have some magic at its disposal.
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No. She was simply evolving and embraced being a sex symbol. It took a lot of work, as does everything. I am not being critical of Teresa Wright’s appearance, just her place in the firmament. Virginia Mayo, and say Rhonda Fleming, performers of the same period, were shown to advantage on the beach and around the pool. Also, it is clear that in career management Wright was often wrong, something which I indicated below that she acknowledged.
Thank you for this insight into an actress I was barely aware of!
If I may be a nerd for a moment though, I believe “The Best Years of Our Lives” was made in 1946, winning eight Oscars for that year. The 1948 winner for Best Picture was “Hamlet”, the Lawrence Olivier version.
Brain hiccup. Corrected. Thanks so much.
She just described 90% of the movie publicity photos!
In reading the Ava Gardener book (I would say one of the best I have read in a year – although I also recommend James Gardner’s The Gardner Files) – one of the many passages stayed with me.
During one late night phone conversation with Peter Evans she said that she was so sick of being Ava Gardner.
I guess 60 years of playing a character made up by MGM had gotten to her.
And what part could Ava Gardner possibly have played in life other than the one she did play?
Ava Gardner wasn’t at MGM for sixty years. The arithmetic needs a re-think.
Well, maybe not 60 years, although it might have felt like it to her by the time of the interview.
She died at the age of 67. She signed with MGM at age 18, so she was playing some sort of character at least 49 years. She was discovered when someone saw a photo of her in a window and so she might have been playing a similar character earlier. After all, Marilyn Monroe played a character in real life from some early age. It’s certainly possible that Ava Gardner was playing herself up from a very early age.
It’s also possible that some people could be forgiven for misspeaking or mistyping.
How could a man NOT find himself a bit infatuated with her character in MRS. MINIVER?! She always seemed to play women out of the league of the men with whom she was suppose to be involved. Her characters were always a bit smarter than their male counterparts…always besting them at the onset of the relationship. When her characters did show interest in a man, you always had the impression it was because they CHOSE their men, not swooned because they could not help but fall in love with their men. In short, her characters were not unlike my wife, Erin.
Ultimately, Teresa Wright did leave Goldwyn and a few years later made the comment, that all she had proven was a willingness to work for ten percent of her salary in lesser material.