Isa Miranda — As You Like "It" (1939) 🇺🇸
Hollywood kidded love to death. And with love as you and I know it gone, people stopped going to the movies. The whole motion picture industry is based on the love between the sexes, and there is nothing comic in this profoundly serious emotion.
In the life of every man and woman love is a poetic experience. It raises even the most prosaic and matter-of-fact among them to unearthly heights, to a transcendent state beyond them, and if there is any comedy in love it is this strange metamorphosis.
It may be that my sense of humor is very deficient, but I always failed to appreciate the screwy plots of our literary gagmen trying to portray love on the screen. This sublime experience of mortal man and woman has been the main theme of the arts since the beginning of time, in all countries, among all races, but you will find nothing in its universal history to parallel the efforts of our scenario writers.
Recently, however, we've had some encouraging signs. Hollywood wants to restore love, real love, to the screen. It was there before we became so terribly sophisticated. Today we may laugh at some of those old-time theatrical antics in silent films, at the heaving and the sighing and the grandiloquent gestures, but on the whole the bucolic Hollywood of those ancient times was closer to the fundamentals. And those fundamentals built this industry to its present position of third or fourth largest in the country. Let's not forget that. This return to real love explains the importation of such continental players as Danielle Darrieux, Hedy Lamarr, Miliza Korjus, Isa Miranda. In the days of Shakespeare, frank, robust lovers of both sexes abounded in Merrie Old England. But later, love became something to be ashamed of in public for Anglo-Saxons, a restraint from which the continental nations remained happily free. And so Valentino and Garbo came to show us how to make love on the screen. They had fewer inhibitions.
I had the pleasure of drawing in the pages of this magazine the profiles of Darrieux, Lamarr and Korjus. while they were still question marks. All three made good. Darrieux would have been a greater success if a typical Hollywood love story weren't imposed on her. To be sure, it was funny in spots, but it would have finished at one blow the ideal man must be above all very intelligent. And very, very strong. Strong in every way, physically, mentally, because, you see, I just lore to be dominated." She lowered her voice as she added, "I want to be very little when I am in love. I would say always 'yes' to him, I would do anything, anything he would ask me to."
"How about his profession?" I asked her.
"His profession doesn't matter, as long as he is intelligent and strong. And yes, also kind. I want my husband to be very kind. I don't care if he isn't rich. I am interested in what a man is, and not in what he has. If he is intelligent and strong, he probably will have some money."
Here is what Isa Miranda understands by glamor. We discussed this famous "Hollywood," but I had to admit that I didn't know its real meaning and what elements enter into the composition of this mysterious charm, even though for years I have been making a living by writing about it!
"Listen," she said, in the tone of one who is going to reveal a great secret. "If I want to show myself as a glamorous woman it is very easy." She got up and stood in the middle of the room. "Look. I wear a big hat, like this, and I look at people like this." She assumed a typical glamor pose, did it beautifully, turning on her sex appeal. "But I don't want to be glamorous like that. It is theatrical. You can't go near her. She is distant, aloof. Would you like a woman who says, 'Don't touch my dress,' or would you prefer a woman who no matter how beautiful comes to you and touches you, with playful fingers, and makes you shiver?"
She smiled, and lit another cigarette. "In order to be glamorous, you must be sensual," she declared. "Feel sensual. But that is not enough, for real glamor. You must also love people, love everybody. I will always try to keep my man with tenderness and kindness, to be like a child and like a mother with him — a man needs both — and above all, I will try to hold him with my body." In other words, her formula for real glamor is sensuality, which should be understood in its wider and more poetic significance, plus humanity. The trouble with many of our glamoritas is that they lack the latter.
"I love everybody," she repeated. "I don't hate anyone. If somebody hurt me, did something mean or cruel to me, I will not get mad, but I will try to find out why. If you always think that everybody has his own troubles, you will never feel mean." To understand all is to forgive all, the French proverb says.
"I had a very poor life," La Miranda said. "I wasn't rich. I began to work when I was eleven years old. I know what it means to go to bed without eating. Every time I have to play a tragic scene, I have only to think of my past. It's enough. I am so grateful for everything I have, so very grateful. I had to fight my way from the bottom. No matter what I did, I had to be first. I will go through that wall!" You sense her tremendous will power. She is not one to be easily discouraged.
Her mother lives in Milan. Her father died when she made her stage debut in a play by Pirandello after graduating from the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Milan. "He died suddenly," she said, tears gathering in her eyes, and smiling, in order not to cry. "The next day I had to go and play on the stage." She learned early the great and heroic lesson of the theatre: The show must go on!
She is an expert stenographer. Can take rapid dictation and type 100 words a minute. Besides her native Italian and English, she speaks French and German. Herman Kosterlitz, or Henry Koster, as we know him now, the guy who gave us Deanna Durbin, invited her to Vienna after she had made two pictures in Italy to play the feminine lead in "Diary of a Women Who Is Loved." The part required that she learn German in two months. She did.
Her last picture in Europe was "The Life of Nina Petrovna," filmed in Paris, with Fernand Gravet playing opposite her. She began her screen career by winning a nationwide screen contest in Italy to find "Everybody's Wife," and playing the lead in a picture of that name. Now she is in Hollywood for her world's championship fight. "I hope," she said wistfully, "the American public will like me."
Collection: Motion Picture Magazine, April 1939