Marjorie Rambeau

Marjorie Rambeau
Born	July 15, 1889(1889-07-15) San Francisco, California U.S.
Died	July 6, 1970(1970-07-06) (aged 80) Palm Springs, California U.S.
Occupation	actress
Years active	1901 - 1957
Spouse	Willard Mack Hugh Dillman Francis A. Gudger

Marjorie Rambeau (July 15, 1889 – July 6, 1970) was an American film and stage actress.

Early life

Rambeau was born in San Francisco, California to Marcel Rambeau and Lilian Garlinda Kindelberger. Her parents split up when she was a girl. She and her mother went to Nome, Alaska where young Marjorie dressed as a boy, sang and played the banjo in saloons and music halls. Her mother insisted she dress as a boy to thwart amorous attention from drunken grown men in such a wild and woolly outpost as Nome.^[1] She began performing on the stage at the age of 12. She attained theatrical experience in a rambling early life as a strolling player. Finally she made her Broadway debut on March 10, 1913 in a tryout of Willard Mack's play Kick In. ^[2]

Career

In her youth she was a Broadway leading lady. In 1921, Dorothy Parker memorialized her in verse:

If all the tears you shed so lavishly / Were gathered, as they left each brimming eye. / And were collected in a crystal sea, / The envious ocean would curl up and dry— / So awful in its mightiness, that lake, / So fathomless, that clear and salty deep. / For, oh, it seems your gentle heart must break, / To see you weep. ...^[3]

Her silent film roles, all for the Mutual company, were Mary Moreland, The Dazzling Miss Davison, The Mirror, The Debt, Motherhood and The Greater Woman (all in 1917). The films were not major successes but exposed Rambeau to a film audiences as opposed to Broadway and Vaudeville audiences. By the time talkies came along she was in her early forties and she began to take on character roles in films such as Min and Bill, The Secret Six, Laughing Sinners, Grand Canary, Palooka, and Primrose Path, for which she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.

In 1940, Rambeau had the title role in Tugboat Annie Sails Again as well as second billing under Wallace Beery (the co-star of the original Tugboat Annie) in 20 Mule Team. Other films included Tobacco Road, A Man Called Peter, A View from Pompey's Head, Broadway and Slander. In 1953, she was again nominated for an Oscar, this time for Torch Song. In 1957, she appeared in a supporting role in Man of a Thousand Faces about the life of Lon Chaney, though she had never worked with the real Chaney in silent films.

For her contribution to the motion picture industry, Rambeau has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6336 Hollywood Blvd.

According to author and New York Mirror theatre critic Bernard Sobel the Reuben sandwich was invented for Marjorie Rambeau upon a visit to Reuben's Restaurant and Delicatessen in New York City.^[4]

Private life

Rambeau was married three times but bore no children:

• The first was in 1913 to Canadian writer, actor, and director Willard Mack. They divorced in 1917.

• She then married another actor, Hugh Dillman, in 1919. They divorced in 1923. Dillman later married Anna Thompson Dodge, widow of automobile magnate Horace Elgin Dodge, Sr., and one of the wealthiest women in the world.

• Rambeau's last marriage was to Francis Gudger in 1931, with whom she remained until his death in 1967. Gudger was from Asheville, North Carolina. In the winters they often stayed there, and in the summer they lived in Sebring, Florida. His previous wife was killed in an automobile accident in Tampa two years before, but Rambeau and Gudger had been sweethearts years before when the former was the "toast of Broadway".^[5]

References

1. ^ Great Stars of the American Stage by Daniel Blum Profile #62 c. 1952(this second edition c. 1954)
2. ^ Great Stars of the American Stage by Daniel C. Blum Profile #62 c.1952(2nd edition c.1954), no page numbers in this book, pages are referred to as Profiles
3. ^ Parker, Dorothy. "To Marjorie Rambeau." Life. December 8, 1921. p. 7; Silverstein, Stuart Y., ed. (1996, paperback 2001). Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker. New York: Scribner. p. 101. ISBN 0743211480 (paperback). 
4. ^ Sobel, Bernard (1953). Broadway Heartbeat: Memoirs of a Press Agent. New York: Hermitage House. p. 233. OCLC 1514676 
5. ^ St. Petersburg Times, November 28, 1932

External links

Biography portal

• Marjorie Rambeau at the Internet Movie Database
• Marjorie Rambeau at the Internet Broadway Database
• Marjorie Rambeau photo gallery at NYP Library (the man in the color photos with Marjorie is most likely her third husband Francis Gudger)
• "Marjorie Ramheau". Actress. Find a Grave. October 18, 2000. http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=13084. Retrieved August 17, 2011. 
• Marjorie Rambeau papers at the University of Washington's Sayre collection
• theatrical portraits of Marjorie Rambeau, 1921 photo, ...1913 photo

Persondata
Name	Rambeau, Marjorie
Alternative names
Short description	Actress
Date of birth	July 15, 1889
Place of birth	San Francisco, California U.S.
Date of death	July 6, 1970
Place of death	Palm Springs, California U.S.