Teresa Wright: Virtue Unrewarded?

Teresa Wright:  Virtue Unrewarded?

(c) Copyright (2016) by Kathleen Spaltro

All Rights Reserved

One of the most distinctive American film actresses of the 1940s, Teresa Wright created an authentic acting style that caused Wright to stand out as a more talented and intelligent version of ourselves. Film critic James Agree in 1946 applauded the genuineness of her acting:  "she has always been one of the very few women in movies who really had a face.... she has also always used this translucent face with delicate and exciting talent as an actress, and with something of a novelist's perceptiveness behind the talent."  Wright's best performances on film illuminated how the loss of innocence can result in the deliberate choice of goodness during a crisis-laden encounter with evil.

"A Girl's Got to Breathe," Donald Spoto's new biography of Wright, places Wright's achievements as a film star, as well as an actor on stage and television, into the context of a difficult personal life. Wright's childhood was scarred by her disturbed mother who turned to prostitution and even serviced her johns with her young daughter in the bed. Wright's mother's eventual disappearance from her life left Wright to the care of her loving, if often absent, father but also left Teresa vulnerable to a lifelong struggle with undeservedly low self-esteem. Wright nevertheless was notably warm and empathic towards other people throughout her long life. Her close friendship with Spoto motivated his desire to write this affectionate and very readable biography.

Driven to become an actress, Wright eventually understudied the role of Emily in a stage production of "Our Town," played the role herself on tour, did summer stock, and then snagged a role in "Life with Father." Hollywood producer Samuel Goldwyn, having visited Wright backstage in 1940 after her performance, pressed her to work for his studio:  "I had discovered in her from the first sight, you might say, an unaffected genuineness and appeal." Goldwyn offered to moviegoers what Spoto describes as Wright's "rare kind of direct, unstudied warmth and an appealing freshness."

Stardom came quickly, as did the respect and esteem of directors and fellow actors:  Wright became the only actress ever to receive Academy Award nominations for each of her first three film roles:  in "The Little Foxes," "Mrs. Miniver," and "Pride of the Yankees." Winning for her least distinguished performance (in "Mrs. Miniver"), Wright would not even be nominated for her two most brilliant roles in movies:  in "Shadow of a Doubt" and in "The Best Years of Our Lives."

In Alfred Hitchcock's "Shadow of a Doubt," Charlie Oakley, on the run from the police who suspect his guilt as the "Merry Widow Murderer," decides to visit his sister, Emma Newton, in California. Emma's daughter Charlotte has always idolized her uncle and felt a special psychic bond with him. Now that he is under her roof, however, Charlotte begins to doubt his character and eventually to suspect his criminality. Anxious to protect her mother from the devastating truth, Charlotte confronts her uncle, who fails repeatedly to stage her death as an accident and eventually promises to leave. Uncle Charlie traps Charlotte on the train carrying him away and tries again to kill her.

"Shadow of a Doubt" paired Patricia Collinge, as Emma, with Wright, as Charlotte. In her classic portrayals of Aunt Birdie in "The Little Foxes" and Emma in "Shadow of a Doubt," both innocent victims of depraved men, Collinge convincingly etched portraits of helplessness. Collinge's moving portrayals of these wronged, helpless innocents set both women at the heart of these films about the intrusion of evil within a family. Birdie's despair traps her in lonely nostalgia and alcoholic oblivion. In contrast to the ineffectual Birdie, fundamentally disregarded by her husband and son, Emma competently runs the lives of her adoring family. Yet her busyness and absorption in their lives blind her both to her own hidden dissatisfaction and to the true character of her brother Charlie. Each portrayal—whether of an abused and exploited wife or of a loved but unaware mother—conveys a profound sense of these women's weakness and limitations. One aware, the other unaware—neither woman can counter the evil engulfing her family.

Niece Zan to Collinge in one film, daughter Charlotte in the other, Wright in both "The Little Foxes" and "Shadow of a Doubt" pushes back against the evil she perceives. Zan gradually realizes the true nature of her mother's family, and Charlotte's doubts about her Uncle Charlie escalate into certainty about his depravity and the need to protect her mother from being destroyed by it. So that Emma must never know that her perfect younger brother is the Merry Widow Murderer, Charlotte must absorb that knowledge in full, suffer the horror of it, and act upon it to the extent of threatening to kill Uncle Charlie if he does not leave their family haven. Zan, for her part, threatens her mother with exposure of Regina's allowing Zan's father to die for lack of his heart medicine.

Zan loves Aunt Birdie, and Charlotte adores her mother, Emma, but Zan and Charlotte reject ineffectuality and unawareness in favor of decisive action against the horror they perceive. In "Shadow of a Doubt," Charlotte does not simply experience the confirmation of her doubts about her Uncle Charlie. Enduring the shadow of her perception of his evil, she absorbs this shadow, emerging as a strong contender against wickedness. Innocence is not the same as goodness, for goodness derives from both awareness and rejection of evil. Innocence is a primal state of being; goodness is a choice.

Innocent at the beginning of "The Little Foxes," Zan endures the exposure of her mother's deep hatred for her father, as well as suspicion of its ultimate murderous expression. Zan becomes good by walking through the valley of the shadow of death. But the effectiveness of Wright's two brilliant performances in part depends on the contrast of Zan with Aunt Birdie, whom Zan could have come to resemble, and of Charlotte with her mother, Emma, whom she protects at the cost of her own peace of mind. Wright's portrayals derive some of their strength from the power of Collinge's acting and from the juxtaposition of chosen, willed goodness with mere innocence.

The interaction between the goodness portrayed by Wright when playing Charlotte and the evil embodied by Joseph Cotton's Uncle Charlie is more complex than the similar conflict between Wright as Zan and Bette Davis as her mother, Regina. The mother‐daughter relationship has no parallel to the initial twinship or psychic identification between Charlotte and her Uncle Charlie. The identification stressed so much in the earlier scenes of "Shadow of a Doubt" necessitates that Charlotte resist complicity in her uncle's evil, that she reject overtly the longstanding twinning bond with him, her "double," fight him as fiercely as she can, and emerge finally from his murderous assault victorious, but hardly unscathed.

Like Zan, Charlotte has walked through the valley of the shadow of death, but, unlike Zan, she has glimpsed the shadow of evil within herself, and she has absorbed that shadowy aspect of herself by becoming aware that it actually is part of her. She rejects her "twin," and, in doing so, she is born anew as someone else. Both Charlotte and Zan emerge from their families with an awareness of the world's evil and a determination to fight it. In each film, Collinge's character, Birdie or Emma, remains an aware or unaware victim of evil.

Sadly, Wright's brilliance as a film actress greatly respected by her directors William Wyler and Alfred Hitchcock did not ensure Wright's survival within the studio system. She adamantly refused to meet certain expectations by Goldwyn, and in 1948 he terminated her contract. Wright later saw her rebellion as a mistake; if she had talked directly to Goldwyn about her dissatisfaction, they could have worked out their conflict. Instead, she acted in films for far less money, returned to the live theatre that she loved, and took roles in television dramas.

  

Wright acted in 27 films, gaining three Oscar nominations and one win. She made 78 appearances on television, being nominated for Emmy Awards for "The Miracle Worker," "The Margaret Bourke-White Story," and "The Elders" episode of "Dolphin Cove." She played more than 40 roles on stage, winning the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Ensemble Performance for "Morning's at Seven" and working under Elia Kazan's direction in "The Dark at the Top of the Stairs." Of Wright's stage acting in "Long Day's Journey into Night," "Death of a Salesman," and "The Glass Menagerie," her second husband, Robert Anderson, boasted to Spoto:  "Teresa has now played the three great roles for women in the American theatre:  Mary Tyrone, Linda Loman and Amanda Wingfield. And she has played them to perfection."  Her accomplishment is great. It is our loss that she did not make more films that preserve that accomplishment.

   

first published in The Woodstock Independent