Margaret Sullavan

Background

Margaret was born on May 16, 1909 in Norfolk, Virginia, United States. She was the daughter of Cornelius Hancock Sullavan, a produce broker, and Garland Councill.

Education

Her interest in acting began at age six, when she gave performances in the parlor of her home. She attended the Walter Herron Taylor School and Chatham Episcopal Institute (now Chatham Hall), where she participated in productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream and Bab, the Sub Deb. After graduating from Chatham in 1927, Sullavan enrolled at Sullin's College in Bristol, Virginia, but stayed for only a year. Her parents' resistance to her dramatic inclinations did not inhibit her driving desire to act. In 1928 they agreed to let her study dance in Boston, but she enrolled instead at the E. E. Clive Dramatic School in that city.

Career

Margaret worked her way through school by selling books in the Harvard Cooperative Store. In the summer of 1929 she joined the University Players Guild, a community theater group in Falmouth, Massachussets, where she met Henry Fonda. Returning to Norfolk, Sullavan made her social debut before the Norfolk German Club but returned the following summer for another season with the University Players.

After playing the lead in Strictly Dishonorable with a company that had been touring the South, she again returned to the University Players, who were in Baltimore beginning a season of stock.

Sullavan's first role on Broadway was in A Modern Virgin (1931), produced by Lee Shubert. (She often remarked that she got the role because of a case of laryngitis. Her husky voice, she thought, reminded Shubert of Helen Morgan and Ethel Barrymore. ) She began working on the voice that Shubert and the critics liked and "after several months of mistreating my vocal cords I found it stuck. " Although A Modern Virgin and her next four plays, If Love Were All (1931), Happy Landing (1932), Chrysalis (1932), and Hey Ho, Everybody (1932), were failures, critics praised Sullavan's performances.

One reviewer wrote, "someday someone will find a real part for her -and then -!" That part came in March 1933 when she replaced Marguerite Churchill in Dinner at Eight. Her performance won her a contract from Universal Pictures to appear in Only Yesterday, and she became a film star overnight. Working in Hollywood, however, was not like working on Broadway.

Acting in the movies, she said, was "just like ditch-digging, " and she tried in vain to be released from her contract with Universal. Stubborn, and with a mind of her own, Sullavan shunned the Hollywood life-style. Some of her antics during this period included arriving barefoot for fashion portraits, explaining that her feet would not show, driving an old, rented Ford, and defying studio officials' requests that she straighten a crooked tooth. Such actions led Hollywood to label her "eccentric. "

During the next three years, under contract to Universal, Sullavan starred in Little Man, What Now? (1934), So Red the Rose (1935), Next Time We Love (1936), and The Moon's Our Home (1936). Her affair with William Wyler allegedly evolved on the set of The Good Fairy, which Wyler directed. According to Howard Sharpe, Wyler reprimanded her for disrupting the progress of the picture. The quarrel ended with a dinner date and on November 25, 1934, they were married. This marriage also terminated in divorce two years later. During her years in Hollywood, Sullavan became a great star.

Yet, according to Shipman, her lack of self-confidence caused her to be one of the most "temperamental and difficult of stars. " When her contract with Universal expired, Sullavan returned to New York, where she took an unstarred part in Stage Door (1936). She refused her producer's offer to put her name in lights on the marquee on the grounds that she had not yet earned stardom in the theater.

But after leaving The Voice of the Turtle in December 1944, Sullavan did not appear again on Broadway until November 1952, when she appeared in The Deep Blue Sea. She starred in No Sad Songs for Me, her last film.

After appearing in Sabrina Fair (1953), she starred on Broadway in Janus (1955) but withdrew for health reasons. Another such incident occurred in the fall of 1956.

Having made several television appearances, including a performance in the first broadcast of "Studio One" in 1948, Sullavan was scheduled to star in the role of Sister Mary Aquinas on a CBS television broadcast but never arrived on the set. Three days later she issued a public apology, claiming that she felt unable to give the role "the kind of performance" it deserved. Shortly thereafter she spent several weeks in a sanitarium that specialized in the treatment of neuroses.

While on a pre-Broadway tour with the show, Sullavan died in New Haven, Connecticut, of accidental barbiturate poisoning.

Achievements

• Margaret Sullavan made only 16 movies, four of which were opposite James Stewart in a popular partnership that included The Mortal Storm and The Shop Around the Corner. She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in Three Comrades (1938). For the rest of her career she would appear only on the stage.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Shopworn Angel

    (The chemistry that Margaret Sullavan and James Stewart wo...)

  • Moon's Our Home

    (Henry Fonda and Margaret Sullavan shine as newlyweds - an...)

  • Three Comrades
  • The Shop Around the Corner

Membership

She was a member of the University Players Guild.

Personality

Sullavan experienced increasing hearing problems, depression, and mental frailty in the 1950s.

Quotes from others about the person

• David Shipman wrote that she "was an enchantress pitched in temperament and magnetism somewhere between two Hepburns".
  
  Critics acclaimed her as "an eloquent symbol of wartime romance, " and Van Druten described her "almost embarrassing directness. "

Connections

On December 25, 1931, Sullavan married Henry Fonda. They were divorced in less than a year.

On November 15, 1936, during the run of Stage Door, she married her agent Leland Hayward. She left the play to have her first child, Brooke Hayward, born in 1937. They had two other children. Her marriage to Hayward ended in divorce in 1947.

In 1950, Sullavan married English investment banker Kenneth Wagg. They remained married until her death in 1960. They remained married until her death in 1960.

Father:

Cornelius Hancock Sullavan

Mother:

Garland Councill

Son:

Brooke Hayward

husband:

Kenneth Arthur Wagg

husband:

Henry Fonda

husband:

Leland Hayward

husband:

Kenneth Wagg