Karen Morley

Leading lady blacklisted as a Communist

Mildred Linton (Karen Morley), actress: born Ottumwa, Ohio 12 December 1909; married first 1932 Charles Vidor (one son deceased; marriage dissolved 1943), second Lloyd Gough (died 1984); died Woodland Hills, California 8 March 2003.

Karen Morley was a popular leading lady in films of the 1930s, with a mellifluous voice and unconventionally angular looks.

Her films included Mata Hari, with Greta Garbo, the all-star Dinner at Eight, and Arsène Lupin, in which she played opposite John Barrymore. One of Hollywood's most outspoken critics of racism and reactionary policies, she also starred in such socially relevant films as Our Daily Bread and Black Fury, which reflected her own strong liberal beliefs. Her career was cut short in 1947 when she was denounced as a Communist to the House Un-American Activities Committee by the actors Robert Taylor and Sterling Hayden. Later she invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to name others when asked about her involvement with left-wing groups.

Born Mildred Linton in 1909 in Ottumwa, Iowa, she was adopted by a prosperous family who moved to Los Angeles in the mid-Twenties. After attending Hollywood High School she studied medicine at the University of California in Los Angeles until a theatre class set her in pursuit of an acting career.

She trained at the Pasadena Playhouse, where she was spotted by an MGM talent scout and given for her screen test lines written to be spoken by Greta Garbo in her new film. Her voice reproduced so well that she was immediately cast, as Karen Morley, in the film Inspiration (1930), in which Garbo starred as a loose-living model whose friend Liane Latour (Morley) throws herself out of a window when abandoned by her elderly protector.

Morley followed this with roles in Daybreak (1930), The Sin of Madelon Claudet (1931) and Cuban Love Song (1932). She was particularly impressive in Mata Hari (1932), which starred Garbo but gave Morley a dramatic scene as a hesitant German spy who is murdered by agents. She was then allowed to display her range when she was loaned to the producer Howard Hughes to play Poppy, the flashy blonde mistress of a gangster (Paul Muni) in Howard Hawks's violent saga based on the career of Al Capone, Scarface (1932).

In Arsène Lupin (1932) she shared a memorable first scene with her co-star John Barrymore. He finds a complete stranger (Morley) in his bed (she has taken refuge from the cold there while having a maid repair a broken strap on her evening gown) and the two share some sparkling pre-Hays Code banter. She was a convincing femme fatale in John Ford's Flesh (1932), trapping a wrestler (Wallace Beery) into marriage, then passing off her lover's child as his.

One of her best-remembered roles at MGM was that of the heroine in The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932), which starred Boris Karloff as the diabolic, torture-loving Fu. The rising star Myrna Loy played his nymphomaniacal daughter who has designs on Morley's sweetheart (Charles Starrett). Though the film became a hit, and today is a cult favourite, its making was chaotic. It was started by the director Charles Vidor (his début film) with the script still being written. Karloff wrote later, "It was a shambles, it really was."

Two months later, Morley and Vidor were secretly married, though they did not announce it for over a month. Morley had been arguing with the studio over her roles, and she later stated that MGM were unhappy about the marriage and her announcement that she intended to start a family. Her contract was terminated after she completed her role in Dinner at Eight (1933) as a doctor's wife who forgives her husband (Edmund Lowe) for having an affair.

Freelancing, Morley starred in The Crime Doctor (1934), as the wife of a man (Otto Kruger) who suspects her of infidelity and plots the perfect crime by killing a blackmailer and having the suspected lover blamed. She then enthusiastically accepted the offer of the director King Vidor to star in Our Daily Bread (1934), his eloquent film about the rebirth of hope in America with Roosevelt's "back-to-the-land" policy for dispossessed urbanites during the Depression.

Vidor's deeply personal project was rejected by the major studios, and financing was refused by banks, who were heavily criticised by the piece, so he had to mortgage his home and most of his possessions to finance it. It was released by United Artists only at the insistence of his friend Charlie Chaplin, who was a partner in the company. Surprisingly, it made a small profit as well as becoming a staple later at college and university screenings. Morley's performance, as a stoic wife who joins her husband to put life into a run-down farm, is an integral part of the film's moving quality.

Black Fury (1935) was another film with a strong social message, directed by Michael Curtiz with his usual zest and produced by the most socially conscious of studios, Warner Bros. Morley played the wife of a miner (Paul Muni) who becomes a fearless union leader in the fight for fair pay and conditions – the film was banned in Pennsylvania, since the mining city was based on Pittsburgh.

Morley also played Shirley Temple's mother in one of the finest of the child star's films, The Littlest Rebel (1935), and she was one of a strong cast in the exciting Goldwyn production about the Irish "troubles", Beloved Enemy (1936). In Last Train from Madrid (1937), the first Hollywood film to deal with the Spanish Civil War, she was a rich baroness, one of a group of refugees fleeing war-torn Madrid, then in the hands of the loyalists. She went back to MGM to play Charlotte Lucas in the studio's fine version of Pride and Prejudice (1940) with Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier. Afterwards, she and the actor Lloyd Gough, who was to become her second husband after her divorce from Charles Vidor in 1943, travelled south to help tobacco workers in a protest drive.

Morley returned briefly, if not successfully, to the theatre, but was back in Hollywood for two B movies, Jealousy (1945) and The Unknown (1946). She was praised for her performance in support of Glenn Ford and Janis Carter in the superior thriller Framed (1947) and for her leading role in The 13th Hour (1947), one of a series of eight suspenseful films based on the radio show The Whistler.

Her career virtually ended after her blacklisting, and in 1951 she had one of her last screen roles when cast as a distraught mother in a respectable remake of Fritz Lang's German masterpiece of 1931, M. The film employed several blacklisted talents, including the director Joseph Losey, the writer Waldo Salt and her co-star Howard Da Silva. Her last film was an independently made minor horse-racing melodrama, Born to the Saddle (1953). Gough, who was also blacklisted, died in 1984.

In 1954 Morley represented the American Labor Party as an unsuccessful candidate for the office of New York State's lieutenant governor, and after settling in San Francisco she continued to promote left-wing causes. In 1999 she was photographed for the magazine Vanity Fair with other surviving members of the blacklist.

Tom Vallance