Marie Dressler: The Most Inspiring Woman in Hollywood

When Marie Dressler won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in Min and Bill it posed something of a problem with the press: she didn’t fit the typical mold of Hollywood starlets. 

via ediths-shades

But anyone who knew her, anyone who has had the joy of watching her performances on screen, knows that Marie was an inspiration and one of the most talented actresses ever to grace the stage or screen. And she did it her way: at an age many are considering their retirements and without any considerations for conventional beauty. Who needs it?

In a February 1932 article for Modern Screen, Faith Baldwin called Marie Dressler ‘The Most Inspiring Woman in Hollywood’ for remaining unchanged and level-headed even after fame, because “there is no one who has won so much, lost so much and won again” than Marie.

Marie was 63 years old (and a day. Her birthday was the previous day, what a gift!) at the time of the ceremony, November 10, 1931—the oldest Oscar winner until Katharine Hepburn won her fourth and final statue in 1982, at the age of 74. (Jessica Tandy ultimately holds the record for oldest Best Actress winner: she was 80 years old when presented the statue for Driving Miss Daisy in 1990.)

And because ageism and sexism has always been a thing, so much of the coverage surrounding Marie Dressler focused on her age and her looks. Neither ingenue or starlet, Marie grounded her performances in realism and made you root for her regardless of whether she was playing the mean and domineering mother of a social-climbing family or the heartfelt and down-and-out innkeeper trying to keep her adopted daughter safe.

Baldwin agreed, writing that “I have always felt that a performance, whether on stage or screen, on canvas or between the covers of a book, should be judged wholly upon its own merits sand not because the performer is sixteen or sixty.”

More explicitly, Baldwin writes: “Her performances are memorable because she is a very great artist. She has been a great artist for a long time. Stardom is not new to a woman who played on Broadway for thirteen years without ever leaving that street of heartbreak and glamor. She has had, along with the rest of us, her tips and downs, her fortunes and misfortunes. And I wish very much that her work might be judged on its own merits rather than because she is not a young woman. For there is really no earthly reason why an actress with thirty years' experience or more shouldn't be exactly thirty years or more better than an overnight star with but a few bedazzled years to her stage or screen credit.”

Marie’s stage career began in stock companies, but her Broadway debut came in 1897 when she appeared in the starring role of Dottie Dimple in ‘Courted Into Court.’ Her first film appearance came in 1909 when she appeared as herself in a short subject reel; her first leading role would come in 1914 with Tillie’s Punctured Romance.

Baldwin wrote that she dined with Marie prior to writing her article and came away with some life lessons. The first she imparted was that “Marie Dressler is ageless. Ageless in her heart, and in her understanding and grasp of essential things. As the years advance, the body, of course, feels the burden.”

Marie tells her that “Fear is the most deadly thing in the world.”

Baldwin wrote that Marie “makes no effort to appear other than she is” and does not “seek pitifully upon the shadow of youth.” Her face is lined “by the ruthless chisel of life” and Marie has no plans to seek cosmetic surgery to smooth them.

“I think every line in her face means something to her,” Baldwin writes. “Is the stamp of some experience of growth, some gaining of wisdom. If more women would follow her example and be themselves, this would be a happier world in which to live.”

Though Marie continued to act both in silent films and stage plays, her film career really took off in 1927 and she survived the transition to talkies with aplomb. After a career-best performance in 1930’s Anna Christie she was signed to an MGM contract and made $500 per week and soon shot to the top of the box office—a spot she often held until the end of her life.

For Marie, whose real success came at the age of 59, when her film career took off with lifelines from The Joy Girl, The Callahans and the Murphys and Breakfast at Sunrise in 1927, she never lost sight of the long road it took to get her to the top of Hollywood.

“Miss Dressler is not a great actress because she happens to be fifty-nine, she is a great actress who has reached fifty-nine years of age, and she didn’t become great overnight, you know,” Baldwin writes.

And through it all she never lost her sense of humour or her head: she had suffered career setbacks and stops and came into stardom at an age unheard of for actresses, but met each moment with grace. A story often told is that she once visited San Simeon, William Randolph Hearst’s California mansion, and a monkey threw its own feces at her. She replied, “Oh look, a critic.”

Before departing the luncheon with Baldwin, she writes that Marie stopped to talk to her, to impress upon her “of the hundreds of stage and screen people who, outgrowing the sorts of roles in which they had become popular, were afraid to play the older parts, afraid to play second fiddle. She was, she said, sorry for them; if only they would understand that they could make second fiddle sing as beautifully as first fiddle, with a mellow, deepened tone all their own. If only they would understand.”

Her Oscar win for Min and Bill solidified her status and she would be nominated again for Emma in 1932 (losing to Helen Hayes in The Sin of Madelon Claudet). In 1933 she named the top star in Hollywood by movie exhibitors.

But tragically, Marie had been diagnosed with terminal cancer in the early 1930s and—and this part makes me so unbelievably angry on her behalf—Louis B. Mayer kept the diagnosis from her. By the time she found out, Mayer had already put plans in place to keep her working and keep her from dying sooner: stand-ins, revoking the ability to travel, working only three hours per day on her last few films.

Baldwin imagined that Marie’s fear of fear saw her battle it with trust, “no matter how often life has betrayed her. For if it has let her down, as it has all of us, it has also given her good things, and happy things, and glorious memories, and hope for the future.”

In 1934, at the height of her illness, Modern Screen shared in its February gossip/heard-about-town column: “As this is written, Marie Dressler is seriously ill again. You know, some months ago she had a terrific operation in an effort to save her life. The operation was pronounced successful, but Marie has not been entirely well since. Some folks claim that she dabbles too much in astrology and that she is guided too completely by the heavenly stars. She is in almost daily consultation with a woman astrologer who tells her when the stars say she will be sick and when they say she will be well.

“Her birthday party, attended by many loving friends, took place before her relapse.”

Marie died on July 28, 1934 at the age of 65.

Photoplay memorialized her in their October 1934 issue with the headline ‘She Was the Noblest Lady of Them All’ and wrote: “Marie Dressler is gone. But, as long as the world loves to laugh, with a sprinkling of tears in that laughter, her name will live in its memory.

“Marie did not belong to this or any other one generation. She was as young as eternal youth and as mellow with rich experience as all maturity.”

Eleanor Packer concluded her article: “Marie Dressier was a great actress. But she was a greater woman. The stage was not her world. She made the whole world her stage. She has gone from that stage, but always her shadow will linger there, unforgettable.”