Happy Teresa Wright Centennial
Saturday, October 27, 2018 at 1:00PM 
The Oscar-winning actress of Mrs Miniver fame, was born 100 years ago on this very day in Harlem, where I'm typing this from. (Well, not literally where I'm typing this from - this apartment probably didn't exist in 1918 but who knows.)
a lesser known distinction: she was Marlon Brando's very first romantic interest in a film (his debut The Men, 1950)She didn't consider herself a glamour girl, which could account for the sparcity of glamorous photoshoots compared to other 'it girls'. Wright's screen heyday was short-lived as many careers are when the success is so instantaneous and large. Still, it's hard to knock the girl next door beauty for not being able to live up to her first two years in Hollywood. Her first three movies (Little Foxes, Pride of the Yankees, Mrs Miniver) all brought her Oscar nominations. An Oscar winner by the age of 24 with batting a thousand record there was essentially nowhere to go but down. Still, before the inevitable fade of her career she managed two more all time classics, doing her best acting for Alfred Hitchcock in Shadow of a Doubt (1943) and appearing the perfect ensemble of one of the very best Best Picture winners The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). Her big screen career died quickly due to diminishing popularity and fights with her studio but she worked frequently on TV beginning in the 1950s.
Do you have a favorite Teresa Wright film?
Reader Comments (19)
Shadow of a Doubt, of course. The best pre-50's Hitchcock movie (sorry Rebecca, sorry Notorious)
Shadow of a Doubt is one of my favorite Hitchcocks. I watched both Mrs. Miniver and The Best Years of Our Lives in the last year and was blown away by both. I need to see more of her. Mrs. Miniver is probably my favorite performance from her. I was a complete mess by the end of it.
I love Casanova Brown(1944) for many reasons (black and white, comedy, Gary Cooper) and Teresa plays a dramatic role(she cries and sobs) while all around is fun and silly and Cooper plays his shy comedy beautifully. Teresa is always good and charming and a treasure to be discovered in many of her movies, especially in the 1940s, her great years as star.
Her non nominated work in Shadow of a Doubt & Best Years of Our Lives is what I consider her lasting performances. I'm not a huge fan of the oscar win or her other nominations so until I saw the first two I mentioned I considered her to be a very unspecial actress. The BYOOL snub like her co-star Myrna Loy still to this day makes no sense since the film was so beloved.
Eoin -- perhaps it was a case of too much too soon with her? Like "are we really going to give her a fourth nomination for her sixth movie?
I've always admired her splendid work in 1953's "The Actress". It's a lovely George Cukor film about the teenage years of actress Ruth Gordon. Jean Simmons plays Gordon; Spencer Tracy and Wright are her parents - and both shine.
She is perfect in Hitchcock's"Shadow of a Doubt"
She is so adorable and "nice to come home to" in TBYOOL. One of my favorite movies, period.
Nathaniel - They managed to give Jennifer Jones her fourth nomination that Dane year and it was her fourth in a row. Obviously I know Jones husband was the cause of her lesser talents being unfairly rewarded. Wright’s snub in retrospective is even more shocking based on the particular women nominated in 46. I watched that nominees last year and it was the worst lineup I’ve ever watched. A lineup which includes two white actors playing Asian and American roles and great actors not at their best is disappointing. I fear of 1946 is ever evaluated during a smack down.
The Men (1950).
Shadow of a Doubt is her best performance, but I'm partial to The Little Foxes as a movie.
I actually feel bad saying it, but she's an actress that appeals less to me as the years go by. I don't understand her nomination for Mrs. Miniver, let alone the win. I suppose it was the necessary consolation prize for two noms that year. And for the record, I really like Mrs. Miniver.
The two performances that I really do appreciate are Shadow of a Doubt and Best Years of Our Lives. There's some shading to her usual earnest sweetness in those parts and she deserved nominations for them. She's also fun in her few scenes of her final film The Rainmaker.
She is one of my favorites. Part of the reason her career was so short was because she refused to play the Glamour Girl for the studio, emphasized family time over work and hated personal appearance tours. She worked in TV and on the stage and never was one to fall for the idea of being famous for fame's sake. I showed Mrs. Miniver to a class once. Several students were unfamiliar with her and were asking who she was. They loved her. I must say Mrs. Miniver played remarkably well on a big screen with the proper setup.
Geez that's a toughie. I guess her best performance is in Shadow of a Doubt. My favorite film that she's in is The Best years of Our Lives but while she's very good in it when I think of the movie she's not the character who comes to mind, it's Dana Andrews, Harold Russell, Myrna Loy or occasionally Virginia Mayo. But I love what she does with what could have been a nothing role in Pride of the Yankees. But there are also the lesser known Enchantment and Pursued which are very good.
I think she preferred the stage as well as not being too comfortable with the Hollywood game but in later years it was wonderful to see her pop up in movies like Somewhere in Time and The Rainmaker.
She's one of 11 performers to receive two nominations the same year. And one of 3 to get 3 nominations in 2 years: the other ones are:
Emma Thompson for Howard's End (1992), Remains of the Day and In the Name of the Father (both 1993)
Cate Blanchett for Note on a Scandal (2006), Elizabeth: The Golden Age and I'm Not There (both 2007)
I sadly first identified Teresa Wright as "that old lady at the end" of Oscar's Family Album in her later years, but am glad to have gotten to know her filmography since then. At least as per her Wikipedia biography, It appears as though her inability to perform the tasks that Samuel Goldwyn wanted her to perform at the ripe old age of 30 cost her her career and, by the mid-50s, she was left to nurse her career on stage and on the small screen. I wish I knew how to see her Emmy nominated performances as Annie Sullivan and Margaret Bourke White, but those appear lost forever as far as I can tell. I don't even remember seeing her performances on Murder She Wrote or Picket Fences. I'm glad her early work gets such high circulation, but it's really too bad that most of us haven't seen more of her career's work.
I always found it interesting that Teresa Wright's and Joan Leslie's film careers instantly plummeted post-war. Both often played an elevated version of an ingenue, though Wright was older. Basically, I think they went out of favor after the war...
There is a shot of Teresa in TBYOOL, near the end, where she hasn’t seen Dana Andrews for awhile, then they see each other at Harold Russell’s wedding. She’s so heavenly looking when the room clears and they just see each other!
Yesss! I first saw in The Rainmaker, her final film role. The role was fairly minor but it still left quite an impression on me. I became more aware of her after seeing her in The Best Years of Our Lives and Mrs. Miniver.I was struck by her grace and her beauty. My respect for her grew after I heard about her refusal to be cast into the mold desired by the studio system, which may have hastened the end of her career but allowed her to maintain her dignity. She remains my favorite actress from the 1940s.
And as a baseball fan my favorite film role of hers is probably <I>The Pride of the Yankees</I>. I know it's all schmaltz and she wasn't particularly good in it compared to her work in something like Shadow of a Doubt, but it's still a film I return to time and time again because we need more heroes in our lives.