Wednesdays in March at 8pm | 46 Movies
On-screen, she could be icy cold. She could play feisty and cat-like. She could be maternal and warm. She could be sizzling hot. Throughout every persona, Barbara Stanwyck was always a natural who showed vulnerability. She was a woman who could do it all. Audiences loved her. Directors adored her. Her co-stars fell for her, and crew members commended her. A professional through and through, Stanwyck’s legacy is a sterling professional reputation and an astounding body of work that spanned six decades. Every Wednesday this month starting at 8pm ET, TCM celebrates the consummate professional and dazzling talent in our Star of the Month tribute.
Before becoming a Golden Globe and three-time Emmy Award-winning A-lister with four Oscar nominations under her belt, Barbara Stanwyck was Ruby Catherine Stevens. Born the youngest of five children in Brooklyn, New York in 1907, Stanwyck endured a difficult upbringing. When she was four years old, her mother died after being pushed off a moving streetcar. Her father subsequently abandoned the family. Shuffled between foster families, orphanages and the care of her oldest sister Mildred, Stanwyck frequently felt rejection, driving her to make something of herself. She received the chance a few years later when Mildred, a showgirl, brought the adolescent Stanwyck on the road. Those trips exposed Stanwyck to the bright lights, crowded dressing rooms and rotating hotels of show business life. A natural talent who could easily imitate dance routines and jokes, Stanwyck declared to her sister’s dancing partner, “I’m going all the way to the top, and nothing is gonna stop me.”
At 13, she landed her first job as a switchboard operator after telling her managers she was 16. She then fibbed her way into selling patterns for “Vogue,” a fake it till you make it attitude right in line with her later character Elizabeth Lane in Christmas in Connecticut (1945). At 15 years old, Stanwyck danced and cartwheeled her way into becoming a chorus girl, landing a gig at The Strand, where she befriended and roomed with actress Mae Clarke at the start of the Roaring ‘20s. Her life among swarthy men and raucous environments undoubtedly inspired her assured coolness in the films Baby Face (1933) and Lady of Burlesque (1943). Stanwyck shortly afterward became a Ziegfeld Girl before taking her first onstage acting role in “The Noose” in 1926.
The role was originally insignificant but rewritten to provide the story pathos, which in turn gave Stanwyck’s character a much more significant part. She initially rejected the change, convinced that as a chorus girl, she could and would not act. The play’s frustrated writer/director Willard Mack agreed, yelling that she indeed would always be a chorus girl, to which the rebellious Stanwyck shouted back that she would act and was “Bernhardt, Fiske, all the Booths and Barrymore’s rolled into one.” Elisha Cook Jr. said that Stanwyck’s performance in “The Noose” affected him on such a gut level that he had to vomit afterward. Her stage name was christened just before the show opened. A decades-old theatre program had promoted “Jane Stanwyck in Barbara Frietchie,” and thus a star was born.
Stanwyck made her screen debut in the now lost Broadways Nights (1927) playing the friend of the heroine after the actress failed to cry in her screen test even with sad music playing and an onion being brought out. However, that wouldn’t be a problem for Stanwyck much longer. Director Frank Capra hired her in her breakout role in Ladies of Leisure (1930), in which Stanwyck plays a party girl hired to model. Capra would work with Stanwyck five times, more than any other actor in his career. Their initial meeting went poorly, however, and Stanwyck went home in tears. Her then-husband Frank Fay called Capra to insist he watch an earlier screentest Stanwyck had done with Alexander Korda in which she performed a scene from “The Noose.” Capra was so impressed that he urged Columbia Pictures head Harry Cohn to sign Stanwyck. The director and actress would go on to make The Miracle Woman (1931), Forbidden (1932), The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932) and Meet John Doe (1941). “He taught me what film was all about, and he taught me what film could do for me and what I could do for film,” Stanwyck later recalled.
Stanwyck emerged as the face of pre-Code Hollywood after her sultry performance in Night Nurse (1931) alongside Joan Blondell and Clark Gable and her unforgettable role in the groundbreaking Baby Face, directed by Alfred E. Green. Stanwyck stars as a woman who uses her sexuality to escape a tumultuous home life and ascend to riches and success in the corporate world. The film’s overt sexuality made it one of the films that directly led to the implementation of the Hays Production Code. But that didn’t slow Stanwyck down. Throughout the 1930s, she continued portraying sharp, beautiful women who were always one step ahead of their counterparts. In 1937, she carried the emotional weight of her own life into Stella Dallas (1937), playing a factory worker who makes great sacrifices to give her daughter a better life. The role earned Stanwyck her first Best Actress Oscar nomination.
The ‘30s also paired Stanwyck with the first of many notable co-stars, including Robert Young in The Bride Walks Out (1936) and Henry Fonda in The Mad Miss Manton (1938). The latter film finds Stanwyck playing a high-society woman who witnesses a murder. The detective on the case (Fonda), who considers her status the ire of his life, refuses to take her seriously, causing Miss Manton to investigate the murder with the help of her best gal pals. Fonda and Stanwyck teamed up again throughout the 1940s, including in their most famous pairing, with Stanwyck’s shining example of her comedic abilities, in Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve (1941). Sturges remembered that Stanwyck had “an instinct so sure that she needed almost no direction,” a sentiment that closely echoed Capra’s feelings about the actress.
Stanwyck’s red-hot chemistry extended to Gary Cooper, who shared the screen with Stanwyck three times (and appeared as themselves in a fourth film). Their first was the hilarious Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs sendup Ball of Fire (1941). Directed by Howard Hawks, Stanwyck plays Sugarpuss, a dancer and gangster’s moll who finds herself hiding out from the police with a group of professors. Cooper is one of the men who falls under the spell of her vivacious charm and the role earned her another Oscar nomination. Stanwyck and Cooper also share top billing in Capra’s Meet John Doe, where Stanwyck is a newspaper columnist who hires a homeless man (Cooper) to be her anonymous voice of aggression against society’s ills who ends up sparking a social movement as Christmas Eve looms. Fred MacMurray’s first pairing with the star also brought Yuletide joy. In Remember the Night (1939), Stanwyck plays a thief sent to jail on Christmas day but is given temporary relief when her modest and small-town prosecutor (MacMurray) chooses to bring her home to his family where she’s showered with love and acceptance but fears that her true nature will be revealed.
Stanwyck and MacMurray would make a total of four films together. Their most iconic and perhaps Stanwyck’s most memorable role is in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944). Stanwyck stars as Phyllis Dietrichson, a wife whose chance encounter with insurance agent Walter Neff (MacMurray) sparks an affair and a plot to murder her husband to reap the benefits of a double indemnity policy clause. In 1944, the U.S. federal government listed Stanwyck as the highest-paid woman in the country. She continued to reign supreme throughout the 1940s with such films as the proto-feminist precursor to All That Heaven Allows (1955), My Reputation (1946) with George Brent; the noir thrillers The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) alongside Van Heflin and Lizabeth Scott and The Two Mrs. Carrolls (1947) with Humphrey Bogart and the exhilarating thriller Sorry, Wrong Number (1948) alongside Burt Lancaster, which gave her a final Best Actress Oscar nomination.
As the studio system weakened during the 1950s, Stanwyck’s career waned. Nevertheless, she continued performing on the big screen in noirs such as Clash by Night (1952), Jeopardy (1953) and Witness to Murder (1954). And she continued playing mature roles in adult dramas in All I Desire (1953), Executive Suite (1954), and Crime of Passion (1956). However, she found her footing in a steady stream of Westerns, (Trooper Hook, 1957 and The Moonlighter), a genre she’d appeared in since Annie Oakley (1935). Her final Hollywood film role was in the William Castle horror The Night Walker (1964) alongside her ex-husband Robert Taylor whom she married in 1939 and divorced in 1952. In 1982, Stanwyck’s hard work was awarded with an honorary Oscar to commemorate her superlative creativity and unique contribution to the art of screen acting.
With television blossoming into the dominant form of American entertainment, Stanwyck transitioned to the small screen. Her short-lived drama anthology “The Barbara Stanwyck Show” earned the actress her first Emmy Award in 1961. She won another Emmy Award and earned subsequent nominations in the late 1960s for her role as the matriarch in the four seasons-long Western series “The Big Valley.” She earned back-to-back Emmy and Golden Globe awards in 1983 and 1984, respectively, for her role in the miniseries “The Thorn Birds.” Finally, a role in “Dynasty” led to the spin-off soap opera “The Colbys.” It was Stanwyck’s final role.
In 1986, she was awarded the Cecil B. DeMille Award and in 1987 she received the AFI Lifetime Achievement Award. In 1990, at 82 years old, Stanwyck died in Santa Monica, California. Always a class act, she recognized the community it took to make her films possible. Of her Honorary Award, Stanwyck said, “You don’t get them alone. There were writers, directors, producers…and the people backstage, the remarkable crews that we have the privilege of working with… and the stuntmen and women who taught me so well. I’m grateful to them and I thank them very much.”
