Jeanne Crain

Oscar-nominated actress specialising in wholesome, girl-next-door roles

Tuesday 16 December 2003 01:00 GMT
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Jeanne Crain, actress: born Barstow, California 25 May 1925; married 1945 Paul Brinkman (died 2003; two sons, three daughters, and two sons deceased); died Santa Barbara, California 14 December 2003.

Most studios in the 1940s had under contract at least one "girl next door", a star whose appeal was to remind servicemen of their high-school sweethearts or sisters and whose glamour was less overt than the noted pin-up girls. MGM's June Allyson was the most popular, but running her a very close second was Fox's winsome Jeanne Crain, who was never more convincing than when sipping a soda on the front porch with her "steady".

A pretty brunette with an appealing aura of modesty, Crain starred in some of the decade's biggest hits, including State Fair and Margie, and later won an Oscar nomination for her portrayal of a young black girl who passes for white in Pinky. The studio chief Darryl F. Zanuck would have preferred his star not to have been quite so wholesome in real life, since she frequently had to take time off to have her seven children.

She was born in Barstow, a small town in the Mojave Desert, California, in 1925 to parents of Irish descent. Her father was a schoolteacher and shortly after Jeanne's birth the family moved to Los Angeles where he became head of the English department at Inglewood High School. Crain later recalled,

I was a very quiet, introspective child. I lived in my imagination and my dreams and my books. I came out of my shell in school plays when I could be somebody else but Jeanne Crain.

Crain started her career by capitalising on her glamour, winning the title "Miss Long Beach" in 1941 and coming second in the Miss America contest the same year. Becoming a photographers' model, she won the title "Camera Girl" for U.S. Camera magazine in 1942, and was cover girl on such magazines as Ladies' Home Journal and True Romance. Orson Welles, preparing The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), tested her for the role of Lucy, but decided she "had something that didn't come through on the screen" and cast Anne Baxter in the role.

A test for 20th Century-Fox earned her a contract, and she made her screen début clad in a swimsuit and delivering one line in the lavish Busby Berkeley musical The Gang's All Here (1943). When the studio head Zanuck, who had been on war service, returned to the studio and met the new contractees, he immediately realised that Crain was the perfect successor to their earlier "girl next door", Janet Gaynor, and cast her opposite young Lon McAlister in Henry Hathaway's Home in Indiana (1944).

A horse-racing tale shot in Kentucky, with McAlister a city boy adjusting to country life, raising a filly for harness-racing and being romanced by two young girls (Crain and another newcomer, June Haver), it was perfect family entertainment and proved very popular. Halfway through shooting, Hathaway is reputed to have telegrammed Zanuck, "Better raise this girl's salary - she's going to be a star!"

Crain was then given the starring role of a soldier's wife trying to adjust to life with other wives in a boarding house near an army camp in Otto Preminger's In the Meantime, Darling (1944). It was an ineffectual tale in which Crain seemed uneasy, but she gave an appealing performance in George Cukor's screen version of Moss Hart's Broadway hit Winged Victory (1944). Co-starred again with Lon McAlister, Crain was one of a group of wives and sweethearts (Judy Holliday was another) of trainee airmen.

Her next film was the one for which she is best remembered, the musical State Fair (1945), with songs by Rodgers and Hammerstein. As the daydreaming teenager who falls in love with a worldly reporter at the annual Iowa fair, Crain was charmingly wistful and introduced (her singing voice dubbed by Louanne Hogan) the year's Oscar-winning song "It Might As Well Be Spring". (Her role had been played by Janet Gaynor in an earlier version of the story.) The director Walter Lang said,

Our contract stipulated that when we finished the numbers we had to send them to Rodgers and Hammerstein to see how they liked them. "It Might As Well Be Spring" I did with Jeanne Crain sitting by a window and the camera almost imperceptily creeping up on her till it came to a big close-up. We got a letter from Rodgers and Hammerstein saying they were very disappointed. They thought it should have a big production because it was one of the big numbers in the score. So we put a big production behind it costing $100,000 and sent it to them. They sent it back saying, "Put it back the way you had it first."

State Fair was a big hit and cemented Crain's position as one of Hollywood's top stars. After completing the secondary role of Gene Tierney's foster-sister in John Stahl's lush melodrama Leave Her to Heaven (1945), Crain starred in another musical, Centennial Summer (1946), a romance set at the time of Philadelphia's Great Exposition of 1876. Despite an entrancing score by Jerome Kern, the film suffered from pedestrian direction by Preminger and a cast of non-singers. Once again dubbed by Louanne Hogan, Crain introduced the songs "The Right Romance" and "In Love in Vain".

Crain's next film, though, was a classic, Henry King's beguiling story of growing up in the Twenties, Margie (1946). Crain received sole star billing in the film, and captivatingly conveyed the pain and pleasure of growing pains and schoolgirl crushes. The New York Times reported, "Jeanne Crain acts and looks fresh as a daisy and brings just the right amount of wistfulness to her part."

So confident was King of his material and his star that one wordless sequence concentrates merely on the young girl's preparations for bed as the song "I'll See You in My Dreams" plays on the Victrola. Another sequence, in which Crain and her friends go ice-skating, features a 180-degree pan by the camera as the Crain and her beau (Alan Young) whirl around the rink to the nostalgic strains of "Three O'Clock in the Morning".

The film, laced throughout with songs of the period, was received rapturously by both public and critics, made even more money than State Fair, and is said to have made back for the studio all the money they lost on the lavish Forever Amber (1947). Alan Young said recently,

Jeanne was very much like she was in the picture - wide-eyed but very intelligent, maybe a little sharper than she appeared. And she was so beautiful: you could dip a spoon into her skin like ice-cream.

Just before Margie started production, Crain married Paul Brinkman, who had played some minor roles (as Paul Brooks) but later went into business and became a top executive for a missile manufacturer. The marriage provoked an estrangement of Crain from her mother, who disapproved. The couple's first child was born in 1947, after which Crain returned to the screen in the musical You Were Meant for Me (1948), a loose remake of Orchestra Wives (1941), with Crain the small-town girl trying to cope with marriage to a touring bandleader and saxophone player (Dan Dailey, with his saxophone playing dubbed by Russ Cheever).

A modest success, it was followed by George Seaton's delightful Apartment for Peggy (1948), in which she was the ebullient wife of a GI (William Holden), eagerly helping him cope with post-war college studies, her spirited optimism also giving a suicidal old professor (Edmund Gwenn) renewed enthusiasm. "The rapid pace I hit for Peggy was quite an effort for me as I am usually quiet," Crain told Hedda Hopper:

But that is only my outward self. I'm quite the opposite really - Irish on both sides of my family and very excitable.

After another screen absence due to pregnancy, Crain starred in Joseph Mankiewicz's outstanding comedy drama A Letter to Three Wives (1949), in which Crain, Ann Sothern and Linda Darnell were the ladies who receive a letter from the town vamp stating that she has run off with one of their husbands. Crain convincingly played a gauche small-town girl struggling to fit into the social milieu of her husband in the film, which won Mankiewicz Oscars for both writing and directing.

Otto Preminger, an unlucky director for the actress, then cast her as Lady Windermere in The Fan (1949), a drastically altered version of Oscar Wilde's play which pleased nobody. The New York Times described Crain as "insipid, being made by the direction to appear quite dull".

She was next given her most prestigious role, that of a young black girl who is so fair-skinned that she can pass as white, in Pinky (1949). Zanuck, who had tackled anti-Semitism in Gentleman's Agreement (1947), now wanted to expose racial intolerance with the tale of a nurse who, having fallen in love with a white doctor while training in New England, returns to her home in the South, where she fights bigotry and prejudice.

John Ford was the film's director for two weeks before asking to be removed, partly because he was not getting along with the actress Ethel Waters, who played Crain's grandmother. He was replaced by Elia Kazan, who scrapped all of Ford's footage and produced a mature, intelligent movie that won Oscar nominations for Crain, Waters and Ethel Barrymore, who played a liberal dowager who bequeaths her estate to Crain in a will hotly contested by her family. The film proved a hit at the box office, and Crain was listed by Variety as the top box-office star of 1949. Her fan mail at the studio at this time was second only to that of Betty Grable.

She had a more conventional role, as the eldest child of Clifton Webb and Myrna Loy, in the period comedy Cheaper by the Dozen (1950), and played a cameo part as herself in the musical I'll Get By (1950) then, because of another pregnancy, lost the role of Eve Harrington in Mankiewicz's All About Eve (1950). Though Anne Baxter, who assumed the role, was splendid, the revelation of Eve's true character would perhaps have seemed even more shocking had Crain played the part.

Crain returned in a less prestigious but worthy and highly enjoyable exposé of the college sorority system, Jean Negulesco's Take Care of My Little Girl (1951). The studio again risked the wrath of a section of its audience by revealing the snobbery and cruelty that underlies sororities and fraternities, with Crain playing a wealthy, naïve young girl whose desire to become part of her mother's former sorority wanes when she discovers the class- consciousness behind the system.

She then replaced Anne Baxter (who was herself pregnant) in Mankiewicz's People Will Talk (1951). Based on the German play and film Dr Praetorius, it co-starred Cary Grant as a gynaecologist who marries a pregnant student (Crain). The film was daring for its day, and aimed satiric barbs at academic hypocrisy, but it was not very popular and brought Crain possibly the worst review of her career when The New Yorker stated, "She looks pretty and speaks her lines clearly, but her performance is not acting in the traditional sense of the word."

When her next film, George Cukor's The Model and the Marriage Broker (1952), failed to do well, Fox apparently lost interest in her career and the standard of her roles declined. After repeating her role as the eldest daughter in Belles on Their Toes (1952), a sequel to Cheaper by the Dozen, she played opposite Farley Granger in a touching rendition of the short story The Gift of the Magi, a section of the omnibus film O. Henry's Full House (1952).

She was disappointed at losing to Susan Hayward the role of Jane Froman in With a Song in My Heart (1952), and fought to get the role of Diana in The Robe (1953), which went to Jean Simmons. Crain was instead cast in a minor western, City of Bad Men (1953), and a tepid thriller, Dangerous Crossing (1953), in which she was a boat passenger trying to convince the others that her husband has disappeared. Her final film for the studio was a low-budget remake of their earlier hit thriller I Wake Up Screaming, this time called Vicki (1953).

Three Coins in the Fountain (1954) might have revitalised her career, but her husband refused to let her go on location to Italy, and her role went to Jean Peters. Crain left the studio, saying,

Fox was wonderful to me but I wasn't happy for the last few years. I wasn't permitted to go to other studios on loan-outs - I lost the leads in Quo Vadis and Carrie. Other girls were signed for the roles I wanted at my own studio.

As a freelance, she appeared in a routine adventure film, Duel in the Jungle (1954), then signed a contract with Universal, who cast her opposite Kirk Douglas in the superior western Man Without a Star (1955). As an unscrupulous ranch-owner who promotes range wars to increase her own cattle herds and is not above seduction to get her own way, Crain had her best role in some time.

She attempted to change her image by co-starring with Jane Russell in Gentlemen Marry Brunettes (1955), a musical version of Anita Loos's follow-up to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Despite a nostalgic score and a supporting cast including Rudy Vallee and Crain's Margie co-star Alan Young, it was a dreadful film. (Crain's singing voice was dubbed by Anita Ellis.) Another musical, The Second Greatest Sex (1955), a transposition of Aristophanes' Lysistrata to the American west, was better, and was followed by another western, The Fastest Gun Alive (1956), co-starring Glenn Ford.

In 1956 Crain sued Brinkman for divorce, claiming that he was seeing other women and that he beat her up. He claimed that she was having a romance with the millionaire Homer Rhoades. Though Crain was granted an interlocutory divorce, Brinkman and Rhoades were involved in a brawl later in the year, after which the couple made up. Crain cited their Catholicism as one of the main reasons for their reconciliation.

Crain played the wife of a lawyer (Jeff Chandler) in a mild thriller, The Tattered Dress (1957), then won fine notices portraying a wealthy girl who becomes the lover of comedian Joe E. Lewis (Frank Sinatra) in The Joker is Wild (1957). Her believable portrayal made her character's decision to leave the man she loves when he avoids the commitment of marriage extremely moving.

She then went into television, winning praise for her portrayal of Daisy in The Great Gatsby (1958) opposite Robert Ryan. Other roles included Rose, sister to Esther (Jane Powell) in a small-screen adaptation of Meet Me in St Louis (1959). Later films included Guns of the Timberland (1960) with Alan Ladd, and several Italian films which gained limited distribution. She returned to Hollywood for Madison Avenue (1962) and toured on stage in The Philadelphia Story, Claudia and Private Lives. Her last screen role was that of an airline passenger in Skyjacked (1972).

After retirement Crain and her husband, who died in October, lived on two working ranches in California. Two of their seven children predeceased them.

Tom Vallance

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