firebirdjudith

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This stunning portrait of Judith Anderson performing one of her greatest roles, Medea, was drawn by my talented friend Rachel. I’ve included the famous photo it’s inspired by so that you can compare them - the likeness is amazing!

Rachel is very modest about her creative achievements, but fortunately I managed to twist her arm and persuade her to allow me to share her art here ;-)

I think Judith herself would be highly impressed with the portrait, don’t you?

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The 1st International Television Festival of Monte-Carlo. January 15 - 28, 1961.

The Princely Couple surrounded by several members of the jury at the reception that he offered, on January 16, 1961, to the personalities of the Festival. From left to right: Tetsuro Furukaki, Marcel Achard, Marcel Pagnol, Judith Anderson and Gore Vidal.

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Firebird: I love your elegant blog - so appropriate for the elegant Judith. I hope you like the book. I have enjoyed writing it and I hope that it brings Judith back to the fame she should enjoy for more than Mrs Danvers (though still celebrating her skill in creating that iconic character).

Huge thanks for your kind message! I’m a few chapters into your biography of Judith and absolutely riveted by it. Wonderful to read how she demonstrated great talent, an engaging personality and, most of all, star quality from an early age.

[firebirdjudith]

Dame Frances Margaret Anderson, AC, DBE (10 February 1897 – 3 January 1992) better known as Judith Anderson

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“Similar to the transformation of the homosexual pansy to asexual sissy, the sexualized mannish women of the pre-Code era were transformed into asexual tomboys or cold maiden aunts. Lesbian-film theorists Patricia White and Rhona Berenstein have argued that another method for hinting about lesbian desire in Code-era films was to keep the lesbian character offscreen altogether. In Rebecca (1940) and The Uninvited (1944), for example, queer women are dead by the time each film begins. As the other characters search for these women (or seek to understand their deaths), a sense of dark and taboo secrecy begins to assert itself, and audiences are left to guess exactly what that secret might be. Various moments in the films imply that the dead women were intimately involved with other women―but neither the films nor their characters explicitly define what those relations were. Letters and memos indicate that Production Code officials were aware that these relations could be read as lesbian and worked with filmmakers to keep them obscure enough to earn the Code’s seal of approval. Rebeccca also has a more obvious onscreen queer―Rebecca’s housekeeper and personal maid Mrs. Danvers, played by Judith Anderson, in a long black skirt and a tightly pulled-back hair bun. In one sequence, Mrs. Danvers takes the new lady of the house through Rebecca’s meticulously preserved bedchamber. Almost as if hypnotized, Mrs. Danvers lovingly caresses Rebecca’s pillowcases, her combs, and even her sheer stockings and underwear, ‘made especially for her by the nuns in the convent of St. Clair.’ Mrs. Danvers never specifically says that she was in love with her former companion, and the word lesbian itself is never spoken. But her obsessive, creepy devotion to Rebecca is made quite clear.”

-From Queer Images: A History of Gay and Lesbian Film in America by Griffin Benshoff

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Wow. Today brings the biggest of big news for Dame Judith Anderson fans.

The academic Desley Deacon has just published Judith Anderson: Australian Star, First Lady of the American Stage. It’s the first ever full-length biography of the legendary actress. 520 pages and 100 illustrations, fact fans!

This book tells Judith Anderson's life story for the first time. It recovers her career as one of the great stars of stage and television and an important character actress in film. Born in Adelaide, Australia, in 1897, brought up by a determined single mother, she parlayed her rich, velvety voice and ability to give reality to strong emotional roles into stardom on Broadway in the 1920s. Not a conventional beauty, she was alluring, with her beautiful body, perfect dress sense, and striking, volatile personality.

Having read papers Deacon wrote about Judith (even making a special trip to the British Library to do so), I’m very much looking forward to this book. I may even have rushed hoppity-skip through the house just now to come and tell you about it...

A detailed exploration of Judith’s life, career and achievements is, I’m sure you’ll agree, long overdue. If you can’t wait to dive into the biography either, head to Amazon to download the eBook or order the print-on-demand version. You’ll find a preview there too.

I hope Judith Anderson: Australian Star will tell us much we don’t already know. I hope it features photos that haven’t been seen for decades. I hope it portrays Judith’s complexity with insight and sensitivity. But most of all, I hope it leads to a renewed appreciation of her amazing work in 2019, just over 100 years after she left her homeland and sought success in the US.

I’d love to know your thoughts on the book if you read it.

[firebirdjudith]

Judith Anderson

Broadway and Hollywood “Movies”, March 1932

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Why’s Judith Anderson looking glum in this beautiful portrait from Blood Money (1933)? Could it be because this blog has been rather quiet lately?! 

Unfortunately, I’ve been unwell since early September. But I’m hoping, now that I’m having some good/goodish days as well as bad, to return to blogging.

After all, the Dame deserves to be celebrated!

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In Italy, Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) was released as La Prima Moglie (The First Wife). That’s a compelling title, especially when presented alongside images of Judith Anderson’s intimidating Mrs Danvers and Joan Fontaine’s naive young woman. If you weren’t familiar with the story when you saw a cinema lobby card like the one above, you could quite easily assume that the woman in black was the first wife herself. That draws Danny and her beloved mistress even closer together in the imagination. The unhinged housekeeper isn’t just ‘standing in’ for Rebecca anymore. She is Rebecca.

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‘Positive energy,’ Mum said recently, looking in the direction of this photo.

When I asked her what she meant, she explained that’s what she thinks of whenever she sees the great Dame J :-)

Why being a Judith Anderson fan is life-enhancing

This week finds me contemplating the myriad ways in which being an admirer of Dame Judith Anderson (pictured looking elegant in 1966) enriches my life. Her work introduces me to or encourages me to revisit landmark plays and films (most notably Medea and Hitchcock’s Rebecca). Her performances inspire my creative writing (just ask @thisismrsdanvers how long I’ve been working on a Mrs Danvers-themed short story!). Her determination and incredible work ethic are incredibly motivating when I find myself procrastinating (’Work hard, and if it is to be, it will come,’ she once remarked sagely.) I’ve rediscovered the beauty of Daphne du Maurier’s prose, thanks to Judith, and discovered Robinson Jeffers’ astonishing poems (her readings of them are *sublime*).

On a more personal note, I’ve learned to accept myself more since becoming a fan. I avoid talking about Judith’s personal life on this blog out of respect, but what I will say is that I now feel more comfortable in my own skin, thanks to her influence. She’s taught me to be more resilient and to care less about what other people think about me (after all, she made a tremendously successful career for herself despite not conforming to the glitzy Hollywood stereotype). I know that you can be beautiful without looking like a Barbie doll. I know that being unmarried and not having children doesn’t make anyone a failure. I know that a woman can achieve truly amazing things when she puts her mind to it. And when all else fails, I know I can cheer myself up by looking at this photo ;-)

Most of all, I’m grateful to Judith for bringing wonderful, life-enhancing friendships into my world (with @thisismrsdanvers, @satedanfire, @ralphsmotorbike and others). We can’t get to know the great lady herself, but those friends and I share a sincere appreciation of her acting talents and strength of character. 

Well, I’ve written far more than I’d intended. Bonus points if you’ve got to the end of this! How does being a fan of Judith enrich your life? I’d love to know.

[firebirdjudith]

Judith Anderson’s views about ‘pleasure-bored’ flappers

Judith Anderson cuts a characteristically elegant figure in this portrait from the premiere production of George Kelly’s Behold the Bridegroom (Broadway, 1927-8). The Museum of the City of New York has a production photo featuring Judith and two of her co-stars, John Marston and Thurston Hall.

Judith portrayed a spoiled flapper, Antoinette Lyle, whose undoing proves to be the fact that she possesses every material thing and social advantage one could wish for and yet is entirely dissatisfied with life. Antoinette simultaneously has it all and is empty. Marriage risks becoming just another diversion. 

In the press, Judith spoke candidly - and sagely - about the poisoned chalice of privilege, particularly in relation to the 1920s social phenomenon of the flapper. She emphasised that she herself had escaped the curse of the ‘society butterfly’ to find fulfillment in her career (which, by now, was tremendously successful). I find Judith’s comments fascinating; they’re not only enlightening in relation to social history but also point to her good sense and acute self-awareness. It’s fortunate, she concludes, that her father lost his fortune. There’s no fate worse than wealth, it seems.

‘The type of girl symbolized by Antoinette Lyle,’ in Behold the Bridegroom, says Judith Anderson, the play’s star, ‘is universal. I use the word in its purest meaning and I ought to know, for in the last year I have traveled far from the United States and back again. And on every continent, in every city and suburb, I meet the Antoinettes or the near Antoinettes. Not that I have ever known one who died either for self hate or for deep love, but I have known many who have reached the stage of utter boredom with life, complete dissatisfaction with themselves, and perfect understanding of the value of the years they have wasted.

[...]

‘The flapper in the United States has her prototype in Australia. Some time ago some one coined a name for the flapper’s big sister. I think it was “zipper”. They, too, exist in both continents. Rich and unrestrained, they dash through a youth full of pleasure only to approach their 30s blase and disillusioned and a trifle shopworn. When I was of the flapper age in Adelaide, my native town in Australia, I was brought up to be a society butterfly. Like the Lyles, we lived in a community considered smart for our part of the world. And many of the first families had daughters and sons who belonged to a fast set. They wanted to show the English visitors that the colonials weren’t dull and slow. Father was at one time a very wealthy man. He was called the “Silver King” of Australia. I was pampered and spoiled by him and his generosity, just as Mr. Lyle spoiled his daughter in the play. Were it not for a quiet, loving mother and her intelligent direction, I myself might have developed as Antoinette did under the limp disciplinary rod her father wielded.

‘I doubt, however, if I were temperamentally inclined towards such a hectic existence as I lead in Behold the Bridegroom. But children of the rich are prone to develop into selfish adults with a rudeness often mistaken for wit. Fortunately, father lost his money, so we picked up our lares and penates and moved out of the wealthy pleasure-bored set to Sydney, where I started on my stage career.’

- ‘Judith Anderson on Flappers’, The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 11 March 1928

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Even Judith’s fingers are elegantly posed.

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‘So soothing...’