The nominees were ...
- Bette Davis in Now, Voyager
- Greer Garson in Mrs. Miniver
- Katharine Hepburn in Woman of the Year
- Rosalind Russell in My Sister Eileen
- Teresa Wright in The Pride of the Yankees
... when they should have been ...
- Jean Arthur in The Talk of the Town
- Claudette Colbert in The Palm Beach Story
- Bette Davis in Now, Voyager
- Katharine Hepburn in Woman of the Year
- Carole Lombard in To Be or Not to Be
And the Oscar went to ...
Garson was discovered by no less than Louis B. Mayer, when the MGM head, traveling in London, spotted her in a stage production. He signed her to a contract and cast her in Goodbye, Mr. Chips, creating a new Metro star virtually overnight. And MGM needed one, owing to the retirement of Greta Garbo and Norma Shearer in 1941, which gave Garson her choice of roles at the studio, including Mrs. Miniver, which had first been offered to Shearer. Garson was a major star through the war years, but her career began to decline in the 1950s. She caused a scandal by marrying Richard Ney, who played her son in Mrs. Miniver. Ney was twelve years younger than Garson. Though she or her studio publicists had claimed she was born in 1909, at her death in 1996 her true birth year was revealed to have been 1904. (During their divorce proceedings in 1947, her lawyer asserted that Ney had frequently commented on her age.) Garson's Oscar acceptance speech has become legendary for its length; it lasted a little more than five minutes.
... when it should have gone to ...
An essential Davis performance in what is perhaps the quintessential Davis movie: one that triumphs as entertainment (if not art) largely because of her performance. The director was the otherwise undistinguished Irving Rapper; the real auteur of the movie was Davis, who has to transform from an ugly duckling into a swan, skillfully showing the steel inside the mousy, withdrawn Charlotte Vale in the early part of the movie, as well as the insecurity lingering later in the poised and self-confident Charlotte. It's the archetypal "woman's picture," a genre scorned by critics until feminist writers began to question why portrayals of women's emotions and problems had been dismissed by them as inferior material for the movies, and began to seriously examine the themes and subtexts of such films. Still, there's a lot of hokum in the screenplay, based by Casey Robinson on a novel by Olive Higgins Prouty, who also wrote Stella Dallas, this movie's chief rival as the great Hollywood weeper.
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| Paul Henreid lights one of the many cigarettes Bette Davis smokes in Now, Voyager |
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