The nominees were ...
- Sara Allgood in How Green Was My Valley
- Mary Astor in The Great Lie
- Patricia Collinge in The Little Foxes
- Teresa Wright in The Little Foxes
- Margaret Wycherly in Sergeant York
... when they should have been ...
- Sara Allgood in How Green Was My Valley
- Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon
- Dorothy Comingore in Citizen Kane
- Teresa Wright in The Little Foxes
- Margaret Wycherly in Sergeant York
And the Oscar went to ...
Bette Davis loves George Brent, but Astor marries him. Then their marriage is annulled because Astor's divorce wasn't final, so Davis marries him after all. Then Brent is reported dead in a plane crash, and Astor turns out to be carrying his child, so Davis agrees to raise the baby as her own so that Astor can devote herself to her career as a concert pianist. But is Brent really dead? What do you think? Astor called it a potboiler, but she and Davis give it everything they've got, and that's considerable. Astor even claimed that she and Davis rewrote Lenore Coffee's screenplay and took the directing out of the hands of Edmund Goulding. If so, they made it a hell of a lot of fun, but as Astor herself said, she got the Oscar for the wrong picture....
... when it should have gone to ...
 |
| Mary Astor as Brigid O'Shaughnessy and Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon |
Astor made one of her strongest screen impressions in a part that, interestingly, had previously been played by Davis in the vastly inferior 1936 version of The Maltese Falcon called Satan Met a Lady. Astor claimed that she hyperventilated before each scene in The Maltese Falcon to give her Brigid O'Shaughnessy that eerie instability. The Oscar was no doubt in recognition for her work in both The Great Lie and The Maltese Falcon, but also for a screen career that had begun in 1920, when she was fourteen. She was pushed into movies by her ambitious parents, who entered her in the beauty contests that caught Hollywood's eye. The stress brought about by her pushy parents -- who would later lose much of the money she earned in bad investments -- and her early success would catch up with her. In 1930 she suffered a mental breakdown brought on by the death of her first husband, and in 1932 she married the doctor, Franklyn Thorpe, who had tended her during her illness. They had a daughter, but the marriage was troubled, and in 1933 she had an affair with playwright George S. Kaufman. When Thorpe divorced her and sued for custody of their child, Astor became the center of a scandal in which Thorpe produced as evidence her diary, which detailed her affairs with Kaufman and others. The diary was ruled inadmissible -- Astor claimed that it had been stolen from her desk and that parts of it had been forged. The scandal threatened to end her career, but Samuel Goldwyn, who was about to release Dodsworth, featuring one of her best performances, stood by her, and the controversy faded. After the Oscar, she signed a contract with MGM, which cast her in sweetly maternal roles in such glossy films as Meet Me in St. Louis and the remake of Little Women, when she would have preferred grittier, bitchier parts. Her unhappiness at this turn in her career led to heavy drinking and an apparent suicide attempt from an overdose of sleeping pills, but she recovered with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous, and continued her career in films and on television. She made her last film, Hush ... Hush, Sweet Charlotte, in 1964, then spent twenty-three years in retirement.
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