The nominees were ...
- Ethel Barrymore in The Spiral Staircase
- Anne Baxter in The Razor's Edge
- Lillian Gish in Duel in the Sun
- Flora Robson in Saratoga Trunk
- Gale Sondergaard in Anna and the King of Siam
- Glynis Johns in Vacation From Marriage
- Leopoldine Konstantin in Notorious
- Virginia Mayo in The Best Years of Our Lives
- Margaret Rutherford in Blithe Spirit
- Martha Vickers in The Big Sleep
The granddaughter of Frank Lloyd Wright, Baxter began acting as a child, studied with Maria Ouspenskaya, appeared on Broadway in her teens, and made her film debut in 1940, when she was seventeen. Her first important role was as the ingenue in The Magnificent Ambersons. In her memoir, Intermission, Baxter recalled that illness forced her from the production of The Razor's Edge for a while, and when she returned she found that the cast had grown so close that she felt like an outsider -- which she used to heighten her character as the self-destructive Sophie, who descends into prostitution. After her most memorable film role, in All About Eve, she found herself typecast as the conniving bitch, most extravagantly as the campily seductive Egyptian princess in Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments. She went into semiretirement in the 1960s, when she married and moved to a cattle ranch in Australia. When she returned, she did most of her work on TV and on stage, where in 1971 she succeeded Lauren Bacall in the musical Applause, based on All About Eve, this time playing Margo Channing, the Bette Davis role.
... when it should have gone to ...
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| Humphrey Bogart and Martha Vickers in The Big Sleep |
Would Martha Vickers have become a star if she had found more directors of the caliber of Howard Hawks? She almost steals the show as Lauren Bacall's naughty, nutty, thumb-sucking little sister in The Big Sleep. But except for this one film (and the fact that she was Mickey Rooney's third wife) she's almost completely forgotten. She began her career under her real name, Martha MacVicar, and was signed to a contract by David O. Selznick. But Selznick had a bad habit of signing actors and then forgetting about them -- unless they were Jennifer Jones -- and he let her go to Universal, which put her in a few horror movies and not much else. She moved to RKO and Warners and had some exposure as a pin-up girl during World War II, but it was not until Hawks cast her in The Big Sleep that she generated much interest as a movie actress. Even then, the part led to typecasting as a bad girl, and her career tapered off into forgotten movies and TV shows. She died young, from cancer, at the age of forty-six.
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