Let’s Praise Mary Astor

Uh...nice pooch in the pic @OP.

I won't play the sap for you!

A few years ago I worked with a woman who strongly favored Mary Astor. Tall and high born looking.

the lady had few fucks left to give.

she was transcendent [MARY!] in Dodsworth

Did she own Astor Place in Manhattan?

Immortalized in "Anything Goes."

She, herself, was immortalized in....

She is sublimely funny in "The Palm Beach Story." The moment she first appears (about 2/3 of the way through the movie) she just elevates everything to a higher level.

"Toto, this is Captain McGlue. From now on I'm going to be seeing far more of him, and far less of you..."

MARY ASTOR: "McGlue! That's an [italic ]odd[/italic] name!"

JOEL McCREA: "Yes, isn't it!"

She was the best.

I lost a lot of respect for Mick LaSalle when he panned her performance in The Maltese Falcon. She was absolutely perfect as Brigid, but he wrote that she was too old and plain for the role. Putz.

Assuming he wrote the review in 1941, how old are you?

that's interesting I just saw her in Little Women last night (1949). She was my least favorite. But she played the mother who is a bit dour in character.

Of course he didn't write it back in '41. LaSalle writes about classic film for the Chronicle. Turn in your gay card.

Excuse me for not reading reading the cultural pages in Zimbabwe.

Great character, Sandra the impossible bitch from The Great Lie.

Superb actress. As with so many great talents, booze was a problem.

When she was in her early 40's, she looked like Alexis Smith (or Alexis Smith looked like her.....). They worked together in the Debbie Reynolds film "This Happy Feeling" (1958) and were also together in "Any Number Can Play" (1949). Just recently, I watched her in "Stranger in My Arms" (she steals the film from June Allyson and Jeff Chandler), "Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte" and "Youngblood Hawke". I also found on line her as Norma in a TV version of "Sunset Blvd." which I intend to watch over the holidays.

Even in the worst of her films, she was always commanding and regal, even when she played a dried-up prostitute in "Act of Violence". I also watched her in the 1930 version of "Holiday", and she was quite stunning as a young woman. She also had quite the persona life, describing her lovemaking with George S. Kaufman in vivid detail. Bette Davis practically handed over "The Great Lie" to her because she was a fan and went out of her way to get her for "Charlotte", a small but juicy part that was a great way for her to exit the screen.

R14 There’s a gay card??? How come I didn’t get one? “Ah sweet desert nights@ something something. MaryvAstorvdescribingvfucking under the stars in her diary.

Juicy, r18, because Jewel Mayhew done it!

R20 And remember.....Grandma Walton was the one who gossiped about it to her bevy of old hens.

There's a resemblance to Fiona Shaw at r18.

[Quote] Lucile Vasconcellos Langhanke

She was Italian... Scandinavian?

She’s the only good thing in Return to Peyton Place as the town scold, who gets her comeuppance at the town meeting.

Runaway Bride (1930) is a fun watch. I linked some imdb reviews.

....

Mary's Norma....

McGavin is rather lightweight thus far.

No comments about her sexually explicit diary???

So happy Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte has made some appearances on this thread. Small but great and pivotal role for Mary Astor.

On the arc of fame: “There are five stages in the life of an actor: Who’s Mary Astor? Get me Mary Astor. Get me a Mary Astor Type. Get me a young Mary Astor. Who’s Mary Astor?”

She was perfect in every role she played, and so many different types. She wrote 2 autobiographies -- "My Story" (1959) and "A Life On Film" (1971) -- both available from libraries and used book sellers, both well worth reading.

“The Palm Beach Story” is one of my favorite films. Love when Mary Astor says to Claudette Colbert “We can go shopping for husbands together. I’m thinking of an American at the moment. Seems much more patriotic”! Or when she says to Joel McCrea “We can take a drive over to Ft Myers., there’s not much there but the drive would be fun”! - if you live in Florida like I do you get the joke in that line!

In 1980 Life magazine did a “whatever happened to “ feature on former stars and the piece featured Mary Astor and showed her riding a three wheeled bicycle at the Motion Picture Retirement Home where she was living up until her death.

I’m surprised no one has mentioned her performance in the over-the-top “Desert Fury” where she refers to her grown daughter Lizabeth Scott as “baby”! High camp at its best!

Plus, she had George S. Kaufman f**k the living daylights out of her....

another funny scene in The Great Lie is when she and Bette are staying at the cabin for Mary's pregnancy, and Bette catches her making a sandwich with forbidden food. "I'm not one of you anaemic creatures who can get nourishment from a lettuce leaf - I'm a musician, I'm an artist! I have zest and appetite - and I like food!

Oh the R16 clip has that scene!

Astor's billing is so shitty. Was it due to the divorce/custody scandal?

R33 I saw "Desert Fury" at a film noir festival at the Egyptian back in 2008. On the big screen, it looked like Mary had a slight mustache. I'm wondering if that was kept intentionally to make her amoral character look more authoritative. You really can't see it in stills or in screen shots or in TV airings, but it was the first thing I noticed. It's a wonderful film, one of the rare color film noirs.

She played Judy Garland's mother twice! "Listen Darling" (1938) and of course "Meet Me in St. Louis" (1944).

She had a great contralto speaking voice, which was considered unappealingly low when Talkies came in.

Now most women under 50 sound like little girls with nasal upspeak.

R40 I'll take the baritone babes over the Minnie Mouse girls of today.

R34 -

“When those glasses come off...”

Actually, vocal fry is the order of the day - a false low sound.

R43 Every time I hear vocal fry, I walk by the perpetrator, put the scratching chalkboard sign up with my hand and make a high pitched nasal sound to indicate that dogs in Albany can hear vocal fry as far away as New York City.

Hers was the first celebrity autobiography I ever read, in 1972.

She wrote both autobiographies herself, they're not "as told to" a ghostwriter. And they're very well done -- all that practice with her diaries paid off.

Remember her line in The Great Lie? “Who ever heard of one brandy?” I remember an interview she gave where she regretted signing with MGM and playing all those mother parts when she still had a lot of juice. Has anyone read her memoirs? I think there were two and very well written.

The Great Lie is a great movie for the drinking game. Take a drink every time they say George Brent's name of Pete. One time Mary says his name twice in the same sentence. "Pete, ....., Pete".

*

In one of her autobiographies, she reveals that her parents "introduced her" (i.e., pimped her out) to John Barrymore when she was 16 and he was 40, resulting in a serious affair that lasted 6 years until he married someone else (Dolores Costello). You can see why such a man of the world was smitten by the redhead pictured in the link at R49.

In the past month in seclusion, I've seen the terrific Mary Astor in several films and TV shows, just finishing "Dodsworth" today where she is the ideally perfect girlfriend for Walter Huston's unhappily married husband. Her Norma Desmond for "Robert Montgomery Presents" is quite different than Gloria Swanson's. An episode of "Bracken's World" features her as the ex-wife of a murdered man whose widow (Lizabeth Scott) is a non-grieving whore. Paul Lynde is very campy in it being dramatic, and Zsa Zsa Gabor spends her time in it wearing a French maid's outfit carrying a feather duster. I love Scott and Astor in "Desert Fury". I saw it years ago on the big screen, and Mary had a subtle mustache.

No. Fuck Mary Astor. Fuck her in the ass.

Barrymore turned her into an alcoholic like himself.

R6, that's Lady Astor, not Mary Astor.

After so many posts it's odd that the full drama of her life hasn't been discussed. Yes, she documented the affair with Kaufman, but the diary became a hot item when her husband, who she wanted to divorce, got his hands on it and threatened her and cited it with the case. He wanted to deny her custody, and he was a jerk. Ultimately the judge ruled that the diary as evidence was tainted because Thorpe, the husband, had removed pages concerning him and Astor said that a lot that was said was forgery.

She ended up keeping her career as Goldwyn refused to cut her contract, which people called for because of the morals clauses built into things in the code). She was filming "Dodsworth" as all this was going on. So she made it through the scandal fine.

Unusually so, for the times.

I adoooooore Maury Astor!

R40, The timbre in her voice when she says, "That's the way I'm made!" is so astounding. I really think of her as my favorite actress. And man, she had everything thrown at her -- scandal, divorce, her child taken away, alcoholism, and especially her messed up family life. Her parents basically turned a blind eye to the 16 year old Mary being "tutored" by John Barrymore. Her father kept her on a tight financial leash until she was 26 and they used her as a bank for years. She found out that her parents hated her for basically her whole life as she nursed her dying mother.

She doesn't get nearly the credit that Hepburn, Taylor, Loy, Dunne, or Stanwyck get now; thank God Davis saw her value. I think she's up there with the absolute best of 20th century American actresses.

I have a DVD with her TV version of Sunset Boulevard. I have to finally watch it.

Although she won an Oscar for something called "The Great Lie" her most memorable performance was in "The Maltese Falcon." She also was highly praised in "Dodsworth." But she never was a big star, although she almost always gave a good performance.

She was John Barrymore's mistress when she was a teenager. A biographer of hers said he was the love of her life, but I don't think so. I think her greatest love affair was with George Kaufmann, at least judging from the gushings about him in her diary.

The scandal about her diary was so sensational that it rated an entire chapter in "Hollywood Babylon." "Diary in Blue", it was called. Here are some excerpts from it: "I fell like a ton of bricks...as only I can fall...It’s beautiful, glorious and I hope it’s my last love. I can’t top it with anything in my experience or do I want to. I know I’m in love with George but I’m afraid of doing anything about it. I know what I want now and it’s the usual thing. I’d like to be with him ‘forever;” marry him and have his children but the step frightens me to death." Anger recounts her talking about "feeling up" Kaufman in a theater, then going to his flat and "it was all very thrilling and beautiful. Once George lays down his glasses he is quite a different man. His powers of recuperation are amazing and we made love all night long. It all worked perfectly and we shared our fourth climax at dawn. And "we went frequently to 73rd Street where he fucked the living daylights out of me...it was wonderful to fuck the entire sweet afternoon away...ah, desert night, George's body plunging into mine, naked under the stars." All this rapture over Kaufman is hilarious when you consider he was heavily neurotic, had a germ phobia, was homely as a horse's ass, and married (and with no intention of getting a divorce).

Anyway, her husband found the diary and there was a custody battle over their daughter. It ended up rather uneventfully; both she and her husband ended up sharing custody. The scandal didn't destroy her career, probably because she was not considered a major celebrity, nobody to get excited about. As for Kaufman, he hid out during the trial, terrified of having to testify in court. After the trial he never saw Astor again. So much for the lifelong "friendship" she thought they would have.

Joseph Egan, a biographer of Astor's, is quite the Mary Astor apologist. He portrays her as a devoted mother who just wanted to keep custody of her little daughter (actually as a mother she left a lot of be desired). And he says all that nasty sex talk in her diary was "forged" or "made up." I rather doubt that. Astor seemed entirely capable of being explicit about what she did with Kaufman. I think she liked to reread what she wrote and relive the "thrilling" experience of sex with him. Mary Astor, despite becoming a writer of some note, often behaved like a birdbrain.

"Something called The Great Lie.....?"

The great lie is a really fun movie. Astor's account of the filming in My Life in Film is the best part of the book. She and Bette knew the script was a turgid potboiler that even the studio did not give a shit about. So they rewrote it and twisted it and the end result is one of the few films of that time that speaks with a womans voice.

Before the pandemic started, I would take the 6 train down past Union Square and get off at the station I refer to as "Mary Astor Place". I know that it was named for the Astor family, but considering that it is near Gary Cooper Union, I thought why not?

R59, the notorious diary was destroyed in 1952, by order of the court. If she wrote those statements about George Kauffman, good for her. Her diary was her therapy and if she re-read it, that’s her business.

To state that Joseph Egan is a “Mary Astor apologist” is unwarranted. Why would anyone have to apologize for her behavior? That was between Miss Astor and her conscience. Her marriage to Franklyn Thorpe was in shreds and they both saw other people. Mr. Thorpe stole her diary and used it as leverage. That’s hardly noble behavior.

Mary Astor herself regretted the whole incident. She blamed herself for the recklessness.

Never gave a bad performance?

She was awful in Holiday, Other Men's Women, Jennie Gerhardt and many others