Background
Louise Beavers was born on March 8, 1920, in Cincinnati, Ohio, the daughter of William Beavers.
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Louise Beavers
Edit ProfileEducation
Louise moved with her parents to Pasadena, California, in 1913 and graduated from Pasadena High School in 1918.
Career
Beavers considered a career in nursing because she "liked the uniform" but quickly changed her mind. Between 1920 and 1926 she worked as a dressing room attendant for a photographer and then as the personal maid to actress Leatrice Joy. Beavers enjoyed singing and joined a minstrel show with an amateur cast of sixteen women in Los Angeles. She had been with the group for about a year when she was spotted by movie scouts and selected to play a role in Uncle Tom's Cabin (1927). This began her thirty-year film career, in which she alternated roles as a maid or cook with actual jobs as maid (during the early years) to such stars as Mae West and Jean Harlow. Beavers worked hard to maintain the contemporary Hollywood image that black domestics were all fat and happy.
Beavers had acted in over twenty-five films, silents and talkies, among them Coquette (1929), Up for Murder (1931), Ladies of the Big House (1932), What Price Innocence? (1933), Bombshell (1933), She Done Him Wrong (1933), and Pick Up (1933), before she won the biggest role in her career, Aunt Delilah in Imitation of Life (1934) with Claudette Colbert. In her role as Colbert's housekeeper, she appeared to create delicious flapjacks that Colbert was able to promote into a million-dollar business. Since Beavers actually could not cook, experts worked with her for days helping her create the illusion of making flapjacks. Her warm, sympathetic characterization of the cook troubled by her confused daughter was considered worthy of an Oscar nomination.
Beavers was the first black to achieve stardom in Hollywood. Although she was then considered for a role in Gone with the Wind and scheduled to star as Aunt Jemima in a film by Sol Lesser (1936), the high salary Beavers could now demand would have priced her out of the only roles Hollywood would offer her, the stereotyped domestic. She acted in over forty more films as Ophelia, Ruby, or Mammy Lou. Even in her last film, The Facts of Life (1961), she was cast as a maid, placed last in the billing and not even mentioned in the New York Times review.
Hollywood's failure to make full use of her talents was a tragic waste. In Rainbow on the River (1936) Beavers did have an important featured role as Toinette, an ex-slave, a portrayal made "totally believable by the strength of her performance, " wrote Eileen Landay. In another departure from the usual stereotype, she gave a fine performance as the baseball star's mother in The Jackie Robinson Story (1950). Beavers was also a pioneer in the all-black-cast films produced by Million Dollar Productions, Life Goes On (1938) and Reform School (1939). In the former film she played the distraught mother of two sons on opposite sides of the law, and in the latter she played a probation officer determined to alter the terrible conditions at a badly administered institution.
She also made personal appearances. In February 1935 she sang at the Roxy Theater in New York City, and at the State in New York in 1944, she gave a six-minute performance, singing "in a pleasing contralto" and presenting a scene from the movie Belle Star (1941), which Variety reviewed as a show-stopper. She toured with Mae West in 1954. In 1946 Beavers joined two other prominent black entertainers, Hattie McDaniel and Ethel Waters (along with thirty other black property owners), in an effort to win the right to live in an "exclusive" district, West Adams. When the case was appealed in the California Supreme Court, their attorneys cited the United Nations Charter as their protection from racial discrimination.
During the 1950's Beavers launched her television career. In 1952 she followed Waters and McDaniel as "Beulah, " a warm-hearted maid who guided her bumbling employers through various domestic crises. The show had a good rating but ended the next year when Beavers declined to continue in the role. She also appeared in "The Hostess with the Mostest" on "Playhouse 90" (1957) and in the "Swamp Fox" segment of "Walt Disney Presents" (1959). She died in Los Angeles.
Achievements
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Louise Beavers appeared in dozens of films and two hit television shows from the 1920s until 1960, most often in the role of a maid, servant, or slave. Beavers appeared in such popular films as: Holiday Inn (1942), Du Barry Was a Lady (1943), Lover Come Back (1946), Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948), Good Sam (1948), My Blue Heaven (1950), Never Wave at a WAC (1953), The Goddess (1958), All the Fine Young Cannibals (1960), etc. Beavers was inducted into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame in 1976.
Membership
Louise Beavers was a member of Sigma Gamma Rho sorority.
Personality
Louise Beavers was stocky but by no means fat; her high-calorie diet was often supplemented by heavy padding and several wide petticoats. She also took voice lessons to transform her typical Californian speech pattern to a more acceptable "Southern" drawl.
Quotes from others about the person
Ramon Romero wrote: "Whenever they need a big round colored gal in Hollywood to play a maid, they always send for Louise. "
Connections
Louise Beavers married Robert Clark in 1936. Later they divorced. In 1952 she married LeRoy Moore. They had no children.
