Gladys George — The Screen's Shady Lady (1937) 🇬🇧
Below she tells you what she thinks about those shady lady roles that have made her famous.
"Shady lady" roles have elevated Gladys George to her highest successes on the stage and screen. Yet, in private life, she is happily married, lives in a California bungalow, cooks the meals for her own little household and takes care of her own garden.
She was a "shady lady" in the stage plays, Queer People and The Milky Way, a full-fledged vamp in her greatest success, Personal Appearance, a lady of questionable reputation in "Valiant is the Word for Carrie," the picture that established her on the screen, and a fallen woman in Madame X.
As for being a "shady lady" on the stage and screen, Gladys George explains there is no trick in it.
"It does not require a certain technique in lifting the left eyebrow," she told me.
"There are no rules for exposing the bicuspids to a certain width for a cynical smile. But it does demand finesse.
"I am not a vamp. So far, I have not been typed in any sort of characterisation. Although I have played every kind of role from a babe in arms to a 90-year-old great-grandmother, it now appears that I was liked best in so-called 'shady lady' roles.
"I get a lot of amusement out of such parts for several reasons. First, one must be a little better in semi-vampish roles than in straight leads. The fun lies in being somebody else besides your natural self. Such roles are difficult to play, but I received my schooling through many years of stock. They are difficult to convey to the stage and screen, because you are something in your work that you are not in real life. Also, the actress must be able to transfer her character to the screen without making it offensive to the public, and yet make the character intriguing.
"I don't know why my work in those particular roles are more interesting than others I have played. But I surrender to the public. It is the public that lifts you to the heights or shoves you into the discard."
The star cannot understand why the critics think she excels in the "shady lady" line of acting. But if they think she is good, then she will try to give them the best she has.
"It's a grand and glorious feeling," she admits, "to know that somebody really enjoys your work. But you wonder why and never get an answer. Meanwhile, you are wondering if you will be able to deliver the goods."
Born to the stage, the daughter of a Shakespearean actor, and Alice Hazen Clare, a Boston socialite who became his leading lady, Gladys George has been on the go constantly since her parents packed up when she was eleven days old and moved on to the next New England town where their stock company was engaged.
At the age of eight she had her own vaudeville troupe, Little Gladys George and Company. At fifteen, she was a leading lady for Thomas H. Ince. A year later, she was touring in stock. She has played in every state in America; had done so before she was eighteen. From Honolulu to Broadway, she knows every "one-night stand" there is.
But that's all over now.
She returned to pictures last year after playing eighty-five weeks in the stage success, Personal Appearance. With her to Hollywood came her husband, Leonard Penn, who had appeared with her in the play.
They took an old-fashioned house in one of the film city's older residential sections, away from any of the accepted screen colonies. It's a two-storey white frame building with steam radiators, but, what is more important to its tenant, it has a beautiful garden, her first.
"I'd forgotten what it felt like to live in a house," she declared. "I'd stayed in hotels so long and moved around so much, that the privacy of a home of my own almost staggered me at first. When I came out to do Valiant is the Word for Carrie I didn't know that I'd stay, so we rented by the month.
"Then we took a lease. Now that it looks as if both Leonard and I are in pictures to stay, we want to build, just for the fun of it, and so that we can have a tennis court, and a few modern gadgets indoors.
"When M.-G.-M., where I have been under contract all along, called me for "They Gave Him a Gun" and then scheduled Madame X for me, I began to realise that for the first time in my life I could stay put for a while. And Hollywood is the 'homiest' sort of place I ever struck. Every actor I know either owns his own home or wants to. Well, we want to, also."
The George schooling was picked up in towns from coast to coast, wherever the Clares stopped long enough for their daughter to go to school.
Between schools, her father acted as Gladys's tutor. Gladys had no regular childhood playmates, because she never remained long enough in any town to make any lasting friends. She has memories of being stranded in Canada, with the traditional sheriff on the trail; of being adrift in Dallas, Texas, and (jetting a job as theatre cashier; of modelling and selling candy to pay family expenses; of winning her first Broadway role in Maeterlinck's The Betrothal, with Isadora Duncan.
Many cities might claim to be her home town, for in each one she has made her home for a period.
"But this is the first time that I feel I really am at home," she insists. "I feel settled. I've had time to take stock of myself and begin to enjoy the things I missed in those earlier years — music and books and short vacation trips; tennis and some other outdoor sports.
"I'm beginning to feel a sense of security. I've paid up most of my old debts and have a little money in the bank and am trying to lead a sane, sensible life.
"Leonard and I keep our home life very much apart from the studio. We don't entertain much. We don't try to make an impression. I don't care what you read about the crazy life of Hollywood, you can make life here anything you choose, and we choose to make it really worth living."
So the screen's "shady lady" is really home lover number one in real life.
The star as she really is: "a happily married woman, who cooks the meals for her own little household and takes care of her own garden."
Gladys George as the famous Madame X — one of the stage and screen's classic ladies of questionable reputation.
Collection: Picturegoer Magazine, November 1937