(Comedy legend W.C. Fields stars as a touring actor in sea...)
Comedy legend W.C. Fields stars as a touring actor in search of a wife in Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch. A struggling mother with five mouths to feed, Mrs. Wiggs (Pauline Lord) waits patiently for her husband, who has been gone for three long years, to return. Holding off creditors as best she can, Mrs. Wiggs still tries to look out for others including her spinster friend, Miss Hazy (ZaSu Pitts), who is determined to land a husband. Responding to her ad for a mail-order husband, Mr. Stubbins (Fields) arrives. However, when he demands a gourmet meal from a woman who does not know how to cook, it is one more problem for Mrs. Wiggs to resolve while she waits for her own husband to return.
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Pauline Lord was born on August 8, 1890 in Hanford, California, United States, one of four children of Edward Lord, reportedly a hardware merchant, and Sarah (Foster) Lord. Reared on a fruit ranch in the San Joaquin Valley, Pauline surprised her nontheatrical family with her early and lasting passion for the theater. She spent her childhood longing for a career on the stage. She is said to have spent her weekly allowance of twenty-five cents for the cheapest seat each Saturday afternoon at San Francisco's Alcazar Theater; since the price of the ticket was exactly that amount, she would have had to walk the long distance to the theater and back.
Education
Pauline Lord was educated at a nearby convent, because it was the only convenient school. Later she attended Holy Rosary Academy where she discovered her vocation from participating in a school play.
Career
Pauline Lord's first appearance on the professional stage came in 1903, when she played a maid in the Belasco Stock Company production of Are You a Mason? at that same Alcazar Theater. Despite her youth, her parents do not seem to have opposed her ambition; neither, however, did her family display any positive interest in her acting and later achievements. Her career began in earnest when she joined Nat Goodwin's company in 1905. She had met Goodwin during her brief run at the Alcazar, and he apparently fulfilled his promise, made during that meeting, to give her a role. She toured the country in his repertory and appeared with him in New York. Engagements with stock companies in Milwaukee and Springfield, Massachusetts, followed.
Although she had played in New York with Goodwin, Pauline Lord made her real Broadway debut on January 8, 1912, as Ruth Lennox in a now-forgotten play called The Talker, winning some recognition from the critics. She also succeeded Mary Ryan as Mrs. Strickland in Elmer Rice's On Trial (1915), but her first real success came when Arthur Hopkins, whom she revered and who later would be vitally influential in her career, cast her as Sadie in The Deluge (1917). Unfortunately, the critical acclaim she received was not enough to prolong the run of the essentially weak play beyond a few weeks.
She then played in a succession of mediocre vehicles, among them Under Pressure (1917); the all-star production of Out There (1917), which included George M. Cohan, Laurette Taylor, and Mrs. Fiske; April (1918); Our Pleasant Sins (1919); Night Lodging (1919), produced by Arthur Hopkins; and Big Game (1920). The long list of unfamiliar titles suggests one of Pauline Lord's professional misfortunes: with four notable exceptions, her abilities were far superior to the works in which she appeared. Critics continually praised her in unsuccessful plays: Stark Young called her first entrance in the obscure Clemence Dane play Mariners (1927) "the greatest single moment in my experience of the American Theater"; Brooks Atkinson was more realistic when he deplored the waste of her talent in bad pieces.
After having been recognized, along with Jacob Ben-Ami, for "mystical" acting in another Arthur Hopkins production, Samson and Delilah (1920), Pauline Lord finally achieved the fame she deserved through her memorable performance on November 2, 1921, in an enduring play--Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie. O'Neill had not been pleased with producer-director Arthur Hopkins' choice of her to play a Swedish sea captain's daughter whom circumstance and weakness have turned into a prostitute, but Pauline Lord's portrayal of Anna erased his doubts, made immediate theater history, and sent the reviewers searching for words to describe the new star's particular brand of realistic acting. It could be evoked in the vocabulary of acting, by referring to gesture and vocal quality, particularly her hushed, "breathless" voice, but it did not seem like acting at all. She had tried to study prostitutes on Tenth Avenue in preparing for her role but found that she could not penetrate their acting; her characterization was eventually modeled on a department store clerk who had waited on her, a "beaten soul tired to death. " Brooks Atkinson, referring to her work in Anna Christie, called her the "elusive, tremulous, infinitely gifted Pauline Lord". Percy Hammond wrote that from her first moment on stage "she makes no gestures and utters no sound that you do not believe". Billboard spoke of her "wistful appeal, intensity, offset by a whimsical humor something so unutterably sad about her, even when she is merry".
During 1922 and 1923, she toured in Anna Christie and then went with the play to London, where it opened on April 10, 1923. Filled with stage fright and fear of being disliked as an American actress, she gave her all, causing the English audience to stand and stamp their feet for half an hour, singing "For She's a Jolly Good Fellow" and then mob her dressing room.
Only one insignificant role, in Launzi (1923), a one-week failure, intervened before Lord created another masterful characterization, again in a notable American play. As Amy, the pathetically unsure waitress who marries an old, crippled ranch owner in the Napa Valley, becomes pregnant by a young farmhand, and eventually finds redemption through the love of the old man, she made Sidney Howard's They Knew What They Wanted a shining theatrical experience. John Mason Brown, in Dramatis Personae, described how her hands "fluttered about her mouth like wounded doves. "
Twelve years passed before Pauline Lord created another--and her last--legendary characterization. Among the fleeting plays in which she appeared after They Knew What They Wanted were a revival of Trelawny of the Wells (1925 and 1927), Sandalwood (1926), Mariners (1927), Spellbound (1927), Sidney Howard's Salvation (1928), Distant Drums (1932), and The Truth About Blayds (1932). She also performed with success in Sidney Howard's The Late Christopher Bean (1932). The only lasting play in which she acted during this period was O'Neill's Strange Interlude; she succeeded to the central role of Nina Leeds, originally created by Lynn Fontanne, and toured in the play during 1928 and 1929.
Lord's growing reputation as one of the finest American actresses of her time was enhanced by the critics' repeated assertion that her gifts were so individualistic as to render meaningless a comparison between her and other leading ladies.
In 1936, after more than a decade of appearing in mediocre plays, Pauline Lord gave her last enduring stage performance as the nagging, hypochondriac wife, Zenobia, in Owen and Donald Davis' dramatization of Edith Wharton's novel Ethan Frome. For Brooks Atkinson, her acting created a Zenobia who was "a frightened, lonely woman entitled more to pity than to censure. Caught in an inhuman triangle with Ruth Gordon's courageous Mattie and Raymond Massey's tenacious Ethan Frome, Miss Lord's Zenobia was the third part of a masterpiece". After Ethan Frome, Pauline Lord never again appeared in a play worthy of her abilities; she does not seem to have been discriminating in her choice of roles. There was a break between Ethan Frome and performances in two insignificant pieces in Australia in 1939, followed by Suspect (1940), Eight O'Clock Tuesday (1941), and The Walrus and the Carpenter (1941).
Her last stage role came in Sleep, My Pretty One (1944), a play that survived for only four days. She also acted in films in the 1930's, among them Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch (1934) and A Feather in Her Hat (1935). In Mrs. Wiggs, her best and best-received film, Elinor Hughes found her to be "an actress of particularly individual style: quiet, gentle, rather beaten, a shade plaintive, but, oddly enough, never giving an impression of weakness". In 1950, while traveling to Tucson, Arizona, for her health, she was admitted to Champion Memorial Hospital, Alamagordo, New Mexico, where she died of asthma and a heart ailment. During the 1920's and 1930's she had created several flawless stage portraits and indelibly etched them on the memory of those who attended the American theater in its golden age. She also had the power to induce a kind of mystical ecstasy in the respected critics of the day.
(Comedy legend W.C. Fields stars as a touring actor in sea...)
Personality
Pauline Lord was remarkably photogenic, her theatrical and formal portraits revealing a face of plaintive simplicity framed by a ring of soft hair, her eyebrows perpetually raised above her dark eyes as if she were asking a question to which she already knew a disappointing answer. Pauline was a private person who kept her life off the stage in shadows.
Quotes from others about the person
". .. when Pauline Lord is summoned to the stage by some role that releases the spirit that is in her, there is no room in an understanding newspaper next day for the discussion of anything else. . She knows certain secret places at the very heart of acting where only one or two people of our time have been before her. She has many a limitation in the theatre, but the truth is in her and it will prevail. In a scene of terror, she is incomparable. For desolation of the spirit, for a suggestion of that kind of sickening fear which is on the edge of nausea, for a picture of a frightened human being in whirling, blinding trouble, I have seen nothing comparable to her little hour in the last act of Sidney Howard's play since that scene of dumb dread which Mrs. Fiske played in the great first act of 'Salvation Nell. ' " - Alexander Woollcott
"Miss Lord does not appear to be a versatile actress. She resolves the art of acting into one livid image of a woman pursued, whipped, stung by forces beyond human control; and no doubt the narrowness of her range results naturally in her amazing depth. "- Brooks Atkinson
"Pauline Lord, known as Polly to her friends, was about the least theatrical woman on the stage. Her style was shy, soft, self-effacing, and defenseless, a projection of her own modesty and misgivings. But in suitable parts, she was a powerful actress. . The qualities that Pauline Lord feared were lacking in herself she drew out of the audience's inexhaustible fund of compassion. " - Brooks Atkinson
Connections
Pauline Lord married a New York advertising executive, O. B. Winters, in 1929, but they were divorced two years later. They had no children.