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Margaret Brooke Sullavan 1909 - 1960

Margaret Brooke Sullavan was born on May 16, 1909 in Norfolk, Norfolk City County, Virginia United States. She married Henry Jaynes Fonda on December 25, 1931 in New York City, New York County, New York and they later divorced in 1933 in New York City. She would also marry William Wyler on November 25, 1934 in Los Angeles, Los Angeles County, California and they later divorced in 1936 in Los Angeles. She and Leland William Hayward Jr. married on November 15, 1936 in Los Angeles, Los Angeles County and they later divorced in 1948 in Los Angeles. They had children Brooke Margaret Hayward, Bridget Claire Hayward, and Leland William Hayward III. She and Kenneth Arthur Wagg married on August 30, 1950 in Los Angeles, Los Angeles County, and they were married until Margaret's death on January 1, 1960 in New Haven, New Haven County, Connecticut.

Margaret Brooke Sullavan

Margaret Sullavan

May 16, 1909

Norfolk, Norfolk City County, Virginia, United States

January 1, 1960

New Haven, New Haven County, Connecticut, United States

Female

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Margaret Brooke Sullavan Margaret Sullavan (1909 - 1960)

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Margaret Brooke Sullavan's History: 1909 - 1960

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Introduction

Hollywood Sullavan arrived in Hollywood on May 16, 1933, her 24th birthday. Her film debut came that same year in Only Yesterday. She chose her scripts carefully. She was dissatisfied with her performance in Only Yesterday. When she saw herself in the early rushes, she was so appalled that she tried to buy out her contract for $2,500, but Universal refused. In his November 10, 1933, review in The New York Herald Tribune, Richard Watts, Jr. wrote that Sullavan "plays the tragic and lovelorn heroine of this shrewdly sentimental orgy with such forthright sympathy, wise reticence and honest feeling that she establishes herself with some definiteness as one of the cinema people to be watched". She followed that role with one in Little Man, What Now? (1934), about a couple struggling to survive in impoverished post–World War I Germany. Originally, Universal was reluctant to make a movie about unemployment, starvation and homelessness, but Little Man was an important project to Sullavan. After Only Yesterday she wanted to try "the real thing". She later said that it was one of the few things she did in Hollywood that gave her a great measure of satisfaction. The Good Fairy (1935) was a comedy that Sullavan chose to illustrate her versatility. During the production, she married its director, William Wyler. King Vidor's So Red the Rose (1935) dealt with people in the South in the aftermath of the Civil War. It preceded by one year the publication of Margaret Mitchell's bestselling novel Gone With the Wind, and the novel's film adaptation by four years; the latter became a blockbuster. Sullavan played a childish Southern belle who matures into a responsible woman. The film also dealt with the situation of characters who were freed black slaves. In Next Time We Love (1936), Sullavan plays opposite the then-unknown James Stewart. She had been campaigning for Stewart to be her leading man and the studio complied for fear that she would stage a threatened strike. The film dealt with a married couple who had grown apart over the years. The plot was unconvincing and simple, but the gentle interplay between Sullavan and Stewart saves the movie from being a soapy and sappy experience. Next Time We Love was the first of four films made by Sullavan and Stewart. From The Shining Hour (1938) In the comedy The Moon's Our Home (1936), Sullavan played opposite her ex-husband Henry Fonda. The original script was rather pallid, and Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell were brought in to punch up the dialogue, reportedly at Sullavan's insistence. Sullavan and Fonda play a newly married couple, and the movie is a cavalcade of insults and quips. Her seventh film, Three Comrades (1938), is a drama set in post–World War I Germany. Three returning German soldiers meet Sullavan who joins them and eventually marries one of them. She gained an Oscar nomination for her role and was named the year's best actress by the New York Film Critics Circle. Sullavan reunited with Stewart in The Shopworn Angel (1938). Stewart played a sweet, naive Texan soldier on his way to Europe (World War I) who marries Sullavan on the way. Her ninth film was the rather soapy The Shining Hour (1938), playing the suicidal sister-in-law to Joan Crawford. In The Shop Around the Corner (1940), Sullavan and Stewart worked together again, playing colleagues who do not get along at work, but have both responded to a lonely-hearts ad and are (without knowing it) exchanging letters with each other. The Mortal Storm (1940) was the last movie Sullavan and Stewart did together. Sullavan played a young German girl engaged in 1933 to a confirmed Nazi (Robert Young). When she realizes the true nature of his political views, she breaks the engagement and turns her attention to anti-Nazi Stewart. Later, trying to flee the Nazi regime, Sullavan and Stewart attempt to ski across the border to safety in Austria. Sullavan is gunned down by the Nazis (under orders from her ex-fiancé). Stewart, at her request, picks up the dying Sullavan and takes her by skis into Austria, so she can die in what was still a free country. Back Street (1941) was lauded as one of the best performances of Sullavan's Hollywood career. She wanted Charles Boyer to play opposite her so much that she agreed to surrender top billing to him. Boyer plays a selfish and married banker and Sullavan his long-suffering mistress. Although he loves Sullavan, he is unwilling to leave his wife and family in favour of her. So Ends Our Night (1941) was another wartime drama. Sullavan (on loan for a one-picture deal from Universal) plays a Jewish girl perpetually on the move with falsified passport and identification papers and always fearing that the officials will discover her. On her way across Europe, she meets up with a young Jewish man (Glenn Ford) and the two fall in love. Sullavan as the night club singer who learns about love in The Shopworn Angel (1938). A 1940 court decision obligated Sullavan to fulfill her original 1933 agreement with Universal, requiring her to make two more films for them. Back Street (1941) came first. The light comedy, Appointment for Love (1941), was Sullavan's last picture with that company. In the film, Sullavan appeared with Boyer again. Boyer's character marries Sullavan, who tells him that his past affairs mean nothing to her. She insists that each must have an apartment in the same building and that they meet only once a day, at seven o'clock in the morning. Cry 'Havoc' (1943) is a World War II drama and a rare all-female film. Sullavan played the strong mother figure who keeps a crew of nurses in line in a dugout in Bataan, while they are awaiting the advance of Japanese soldiers who are about to take over. It was the last film Sullavan made with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. After its completion, she was free of all film commitments. She had often referred to MGM and Universal as "jails". When her husband, Leland Hayward, tried to read her the good reviews of Cry 'Havoc', she responded with usual bluntness: "You read them, use them for toilet paper. I had enough hell with that damned picture while making it – I don't want to read about it now!" Films with James Stewart Sullavan's co-starring roles with James Stewart are among the highlights of their early careers. In 1935, Sullavan had decided on doing Next Time We Love. She had strong reservations about the story, but had to "work off the damned contract". The script contained a role she thought might be ideal for Stewart, who was best friends with Sullavan's first husband, actor Henry Fonda. Years earlier, during a casual conversation with some fellow actors on Broadway, Sullavan predicted Stewart would become a major Hollywood star. By 1936, Stewart was a contract player at MGM but getting only small parts in B-movies. At that time Sullavan worked for Universal and when she brought up Stewart's name, they were puzzled. The Universal casting people had never heard of him. At Sullavan's suggestion Universal agreed to test him for her leading man and eventually he was borrowed from a willing MGM to star with Sullavan in Next Time We Love. Sullavan and Stewart in The Shopworn Angel, 1938. Stewart had been nervous and unsure of himself during the early stages of production. At that time he had only had two minor MGM parts which had not given him much camera experience. The director, Edward H. Griffith, began bullying Stewart. "Maggie, he's wet behind the ears," Griffith told Sullavan. "He's going to make a mess of things." She believed in Stewart and spent evenings coaching him and helping him scale down his awkward mannerisms and hesitant speech that were soon to be famous around the world. "It was Margaret Sullavan who made James Stewart a star," director Griffith later said. "And she did, too," Bill Grady from MGM agreed. "That boy came back from Universal so changed I hardly recognized him."[20] Gossip in Hollywood at that time (1935–36) was that William Wyler, Sullavan's then-husband, was suspicious about his wife's and Stewart's private rehearsing together. When Sullavan divorced Wyler in 1936 and married Leland Hayward that same year, they moved to a colonial house just a block down from Stewart. Stewart's frequent visits to the Sullavan/Hayward home soon restoked the rumors of his romantic feelings for Sullavan. Sullavan and Stewart's second movie together was The Shopworn Angel (1938). "Why, they're red-hot when they get in front of a camera," Louis B. Mayer said about their onscreen chemistry. "I don't know what the hell it is, but it sure jumps off the screen." Walter Pidgeon, who was part of the triangle in The Shopworn Angel later recalled: "I really felt like the odd-man-out in that one. It was really all Jimmy and Maggie ... It was so obvious he was in love with her. He came absolutely alive in his scenes with her, playing with a conviction and a sincerity I never knew him to summon away from her." Eventually the duo made four movies together between 1936 and 1940 (Next Time We Love, The Shopworn Angel, The Shop Around the Corner, and The Mortal Storm). Later years Margaret Sullavan and Leland Hayward among the patrons of the Stork Club in New York City (November 1944) Sullavan took a break from films from 1943-50. Throughout her career, Sullavan seemed to prefer the stage to the movies. She felt that only on the stage could she improve her skills as an actor. "When I really learn to act, I may take what I have learned back to Hollywood and display it on the screen", she said in an interview in October 1936 (when she was doing Stage Door on Broadway between movies). "But as long as the flesh-and-blood theatre will have me, it is to the flesh-and-blood theatre I'll belong. I really am stage-struck. And if that be treason, Hollywood will have to make the most of it". Another reason for her early retirement from the screen (1943) was that she wanted to spend more time with her children, Brooke, Bridget and Bill (then 6, 4 and 2 years old). She felt that she had been neglecting them and felt guilty about it. Sullavan would still do stage work on occasion. From 1943–44 she played the sexually inexperienced but curious Sally Middleton in The Voice of the Turtle (by John Van Druten) on Broadway and later in London (1947). After her short return to the screen in 1950 with No Sad Songs for Me, she did not return to the stage until 1952. Her choice then was as the suicidal Hester Collyer, who meets a fellow sufferer, Mr. Miller (played by Herbert Berghof), in Terence Rattigan's The Deep Blue Sea. In 1953 she agreed to appear in Sabrina Fair by Samuel Taylor. She came back to the screen in 1950 to do one last picture, No Sad Songs for Me. She played a suburban housewife and mother who learns that she will die of cancer within a year and who then determines to find a "second" wife for her soon-to-be-widower husband (Wendell Corey). Natalie Wood, then eleven, plays their daughter. After No Sad Songs for Me and its favorable reviews, Sullavan had a number of offers for other films, but she decided to concentrate on the stage for the rest of her career. In 1955–56 Sullavan appeared in Janus, a comedy by playwright Carolyn Green. Sullavan played the part of Jessica who writes under the pen name Janus, and Robert Preston played her husband. The play ran for 251 performances from November 1955 to June 1956. In the late 1950s Sullavan's hearing and depression were getting worse. However, in 1959 she agreed to do Sweet Love Remembered by playwright Ruth Goetz. It was to be Sullavan's first Broadway appearance in four years. Rehearsals began on December 1, 1959. She had mixed emotions about a return to acting and her depression soon became clear to everyone: "I loathe acting", she said on the very day she started rehearsals. "I loathe what it does to my life. It cancels you out. You cannot live while you are working. You are a person surrounded by an unbreachable wall". On December 18, 1955, Sullavan appeared as the mystery guest on the TV panel show What's My Line?.
05/16

1909

Birthday

May 16, 1909

Birthdate

Norfolk, Norfolk City County, Virginia United States

Birthplace

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Ethnicity & Family History

Margaret Sullavan BIRTH 16 May 1909 Norfolk, Norfolk City, Virginia, USA DEATH 1 Jan 1960 (aged 50) New Haven, New Haven County, Connecticut, USA BURIAL Saint Mary's Whitechapel Episcopal Churchyard Lancaster, Lancaster County, Virginia, USA MEMORIAL ID 1000 · View Source Actress. Remembered as the first wife of actor Henry Fonda, she was born in Norfolk, Virginia, the daughter of wealthy stockbroker Cornelius Hancock and heiress Garland Council Sullavan, She attended numerous private schools while growing up, studying drama. She performed with the Harvard University Players and began her acting career with the Broadway play "A Modern Virgin" (1931). After meeting aspiring actor Henry Fonda in the Harvard University Players, she married him on Christmas Day, 1931, but their marriage only lasted a few of months, ending in divorce. Her later marriages to director William Wyler (1934 to 1936) and to movie agent Leland Hayward (1936 to 1947) were also stormy, although she appeared to have found love with Kenneth Wagg, who she married in 1950. She became making films in 1933, with "Only Yesterday" and played opposite her ex-husband Henry Fonda in the 1936 film, "The Moon's Our Home." She earned an Oscar nomination in "Three Comrades" (1938), playing the role of Patricia Hollmann against screen star Robert Taylor, her only Oscar nomination. She would make several movies with Jimmy Stewart, with whom she had some chemistry, including "Next Time We Love" (1936), "The Shopworn Angel" (1938), "The Shop Around the Corner" (1940), and "The Mortal Storm" (1940). Considered the epitome of grace and charm on screen, she was angry and self-destructive off screen. After the film "Cry Havoc" (1943), she was unable to find work and she turned to alcohol to sooth herself. Her only film after 1943 was the role of Mary Scott in "No Sad Songs for Me" (1950). She was able to appear in a number of television roles in the early 1950s, but most producers wanted no part of her. She also discovered that she was becoming deaf in her later years, and committed suicide with an overdose of pills (barbiturates), although the county coroner ruled the death was accidental. Her daughter, Brooke Hayward, would later write a harrowing memoir of the family's life together, "Haywire, " which became a television movie in 1980. Family Members Parents Cornelius Hancock Sullavan 1877–1950 Garland Annie Councill Sullavan 1876–1952 Spouses Henry Fonda 1905–1982 (m. 1931) William Wyler 1902–1981 (m. 1934) William Leland Hayward 1902–1971 (m. 1936) Kenneth Arthur Wagg 1909–2000 (m. 1950) Siblings Cornelius Hancock Sullavan 1914–1991 Half Siblings Lewise Winston Gregory Davies 1902–1985 Children Bridget Hayward 1939–1960 William Leland Hayward 1941–2008
Nationality & Locations

United States.
Early Life & Education

Harvard. Theatre.
Religious Beliefs

Epicopalian.
Professional Career

Famous Actress. Theater Star. Movie Star.
Personal Life & Family

Liberal.
01/1

1960

Death

January 1, 1960

Death date

Barbituate Poisoning

Cause of death

New Haven, New Haven County, Connecticut United States
Death location

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Obituary

Margaret Sullavan Born May 16, 1909 in Norfolk, Virginia, USA Died January 1, 1960 in New Haven, Connecticut, USA (drug overdose) Birth Name Margaret Brooke Sullavan Height 5' 2" (1.57 m) Mini Bio (1) Born in Norfolk, Virginia to wealthy stockbroker Cornelius Hancock Sullavan and heiress Garland Council Sullavan, Margaret Brooke overcame a muscle weakness in her childhood to go on to become a rebellious teenager at posh private schools. She went on to perform with the University Players at Harvard and made her Broadway debut in Hello, Lola in 1926. Her Christmas Day marriage in 1931 to Henry Fonda lasted only 15 months, and her later marriages to director William Wyler and agent Leland Hayward were also tempestuous. Two of her three children, Bridget and Bill, would spend some time in mental institutions, and commit suicide. Friends noted that the collapse of her family life led to her breakdown. Her condition worsened over time, until she was discovered unconscious from barbiturate poisoning in a hotel room. Her death was ruled accidental by the county coroner. Spouse (4) Kenneth Arthur Wagg (30 August 1950 - 1 January 1960) ( her death) Leland Hayward (15 November 1936 - 28 April 1949) ( divorced) ( 3 children) William Wyler (25 November 1934 - 13 March 1936) ( divorced) Henry Fonda (25 December 1931 - 14 March 1933) ( divorced) Trade Mark (1) Husky voice Trivia (23) She and Henry Fonda were divorced after two years. Former mother-in-law of Peter Duchin and Dennis Hopper. Grandmother of Marin Hopper. As a child, family friend Peter Fonda had a crush on Sullavan's daughter Bridget. In adulthood, after Bridget committed suicide, he named his own daughter (Bridget Fonda) after her. As written in a 1940s Architectural Digest piece about her Brentwood, California home, Sullavan shared that she chose the Connecticut-style colonial home due to her love of New England. After years of searching for the quintessential property, she and her then-husband Leland Hayward purchased a rambling saltbox house on 100 bucolic acres in Brookfield, Connecticut. She suffered from a congenital hearing defect, otosclerosis, that worsened as she aged, making her more and more hard of hearing. Her voice developed its distinctive throatiness because she could hear low tones better than high ones. Her eldest daughter, actress Brooke Hayward, wrote an autobiographical book titled "Haywire" which was a best-seller in 1981. It was later made into the television movie Haywire (1980), starring Lee Remick. Her son, William Hayward, also committed suicide. He died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the heart on March 8, 2008, in his trailer in Castaic, California. He was 66 years old. Her youngest daughter, Bridget, was found dead in her Manhattan apartment on October 31, 1960, only eleven months after her mother died. It was ruled a suicide by drug overdose, like her mother's death. She was 21 years old. Turned down the part of Ellie Andrews in It Happened One Night (1934). Claudette Colbert was then given the role and won a best actress Oscar for her performance. When she was attending Harvard University, she performed with the University Players with future stars like James Stewart, Henry Fonda and Kent Smith. Was considered for the role of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939). Gave birth to her 3rd child at age 31, a son William Hayward on March 27, 1941. Child's father was her 3rd husband, Leland Hayward. Gave birth to her 2nd child at age 29, a daughter Bridget Hayward on February 18, 1939. Child's father was her 3rd husband, Leland Hayward. Gave birth to her 1st child at age 28, a daughter Brooke Hayward on July 5, 1937. Child's father was her 3rd husband, Leland Hayward. In June 1934 it was announced in movie industry Trade Papers that Margaret Sullavan's next movie after The Good Fairy (1935) would be "Within These Present" based on a story by Margaret Ayer Barnes. The movie was eventually never made. Like her former husbands Henry Fonda and William Wyler, she was a political liberal. Joshua Logan said of her: "She was so attractive, and so beautiful, and she had so many little Southern tricks... to win you, but she was willful as all get out." (From the 2017 dual biography of Henry Fonda and James Stewart, Hank & Jim, by film historian Scott Eyman).

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Margaret Brooke Sullavan lived 21 years shorter than the average family member when died at the age of 50.

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