Fay Bainter — Home to Hollywood (1938) 🇺🇸
Fay Bainter has finally capitulated to the blandishments of Hollywood. When producers waved contracts in her face and proffered featured roles in such outstanding pictures as Jezebel and "White Banners," she signed a term contract with the astute Warner Brothers, and said "goodbye" to her beloved Broadway for awhile.
by Scoop Conlon
For many years the name of Fay Bainter has been synonymous with success and electric lights along Broadway. Her performances were usually brilliant and always distinctive; her plays were uniformly successful, thus gaining her the appellation "Two-Year Bainter" in the parlance of Broadway, due to the long runs of shows graced with her presence.
What manner of personality is Fay Bainter?
For a beginning, we may say that any person who was born in Los Angeles, works in Hollywood and prefers to live in New York is certainly an anomaly. She started early in life being "different."
Fay was the Shirley Temple of the "stock companies" and "tent shows" when she was four years old. Much of her ability as an actress can be traced to the long, hard years of training and experience playing anything and everything in the theatre from Uncle Tom's Cabin to Shakespeare, and a song and dance in the olio.
In fact, one of this remarkable woman's most outstanding performances in the American theatre was that of Topsy in an all-star revival of Uncle Tom's Cabin in New York several years ago, when she was at the peak of her stage career.
Yes, La Bainter was startling even in the more sedate days of the theatre.
She doesn't look particularly exotic, yet she became famous overnight by Oriental roles.
She portrayed Ming Toy in East Is West and the Princess Image in The Willow Tree so realistically that enthusiastic press agents and managers had to be suppressed in their efforts to support the growing belief that she was either part Chinese or Japanese.
Bainter eyebrows and slanting eyes became the rage among the debutante devotees of the theatre.
Only recently Fay gave the screen a fitting demonstration of her peculiar talents when she portrayed a Tartar woman in "Michael Strogoff."
Temperamental? Yes, we would say that Miss Bainter has her share of temperament, but she has the rare gift of being able to "temper" her temperament, if you know what we mean.
As that astute director, Gregory La Cava, says: "I wouldn't give a plugged nickel for an actress who wasn't full of fireworks. I like 'em with red-hot inflammable temperaments."
As a person, the erstwhile exotic actress is the best dog-goned chicken raiser, egg gatherer and vegetable grower in New York state, at least, according to her enthusiastic description of her own bucolic pursuits. Believe it or not, the aristocratic lady of the theatre actually markets her farm produce.
She is generous to a fault and extravagant as the devil at times, but how she can barter and bargain in the matter of eggs and vegetables!
Her greatest infatuations are her husband and son, Reginald Venable, and Reginald Venable, Jr.
Reginald, Senior, is a retired United States Naval officer and looks after the farm while Fay is in Hollywood. Reginald, Junior, is fourteen and a student in an Eastern prep school.
She isn't much of a party girl, so this is one side of Hollywood that won't know her. Like all good farmers, she is strictly an "early to bed, early to rise" person when she can get away with it.
Her cooking is famous. She doesn't play tennis, golf or badminton; she does ride horseback, swims and she can sail a boat.
In appearance she is fashionably slender, medium-height, chic in dress, distinguished in bearing. She is undeniably attractive, yet more striking than beautiful. Hers is a most complex face, because of its mobility. Thoroughly American in features, yet there are fleeting expressions, moods in which a keen observer may detect that odd quality that enables La Bainter to essay exotic roles so convincingly.
No linguist, yet she can speak any dialect whether it be a Southern honey drawl, a harsh Cockney jargon or a Chinese sing-song with convincing realism.
Hollywood is predicting stardom for her in 1938, but any laurels she wins in pictures will rest very easily on her proud head. After all, she has worn her many successes well for years.
Fay Bainter, recently signed to a long term contract, will be seen shortly in that drama of Civil War excitements, Jezebel, as part of the big cast headed by Bette Davis.
Remember William Haines? He is a very successful interior decorator in Hollywood, though this picture was taken while on a vacation in Miami at the Roney-Plaza Cabana Sun Club.
Collection: Hollywood Magazine, April 1938