Awards presented March 7, 1946
The nominees were ...
... when they should have been ...
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| Anne Revere and her Oscar |
Velvet Brown (an unnervingly beautiful twelve-year-old Elizabeth Taylor) wins a horse in a raffle and, with the aid of scruffy Mi Taylor (Mickey Rooney), trains it to run in the Grand National steeplechase. When a jockey can't be found, she disguises herself as a boy and rides the horse herself. A classic, directed by Clarence Brown, that created a generation of horse-mad little girls. Revere's performance as Velvet's mother, who was a champion swimmer and wants her daughter to have the same chance to prove herself, is one of the film's highlights. Revere made her Broadway debut in 1931, but except for one film in 1934, didn't come to Hollywood until 1940. Though she sometimes played villains, she found her niche as a character actress in motherly roles: In addition to Taylor's in
National Velvet, she played Jennifer Jones's in
The Song of Bernadette and Gregory Peck's in
Gentlemen's Agreement, receiving Oscar nominations for those roles. She also played John Garfield's mother in
Body and Soul and Montgomery Clift's in
A Place in the Sun, but wound up on the blacklist in 1951, the year of the latter picture's release, after invoking the Fifth Amendment in testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee. (Lovers of irony always cite the fact that she was a direct descendant of Paul Revere.) She supported herself by giving acting lessons before resuming her career on Broadway, where she won the Tony Award for her performance in
Toys in the Attic in 1960. She returned to the movies in 1970 for roles in
Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon and
Macho Callahan, but much of her later career was spent on stage and television.
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| Elizabeth Taylor and Revere in National Velvet |
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