“The reminder that there are people who have worse troubles than you is not an effective pain-killer.” — Mary Astor

From the calculating dangerous Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon …

… to the tender warm matriarch of Meet Me in St. Louis…

… this was Mary Astor’s flexible range.

To those who “knew her when”, Astor’s transformation into playing good-hearted mother figures must have been quite an interesting sight. Mary Astor, with her Gibson-Girl profile, her womanly figure, was completely believable as treacherous, cold as ice tough hard DAMES. Perhaps her specific brand of beauty – idealized, a 19th-century kind of beauty – made her even more effective in these complex roles. She didn’t “look the part.”

She won Best Supporting Actress for her role as the poisonous Sandra in The Great Lie, opposite Bette Davis, who played the “good” woman, by contrast. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen The Great Lie.

You also haven’t lived until you’ve seen her as a butch pants-suit-wearing desert matriarch in the overheated noir Desert Fury. Desert Fury is rare, and rarely shown. Keep your eyes peeled, because it is GREAT, and she is great in it.

Plus, there’s this moment between Astor and Lizabeth Scott.

Astor’s personal life was tumultuous. Her first husband (brother to Howard Hawks) died in a plane crash. She got married again and the couple had a child. Eventually, the couple divorced, a very messy and public divorce, complete with nasty custody battle. Mary Astor’s private diary, where she wrote in explicit luxurious X-rated language about her sex affair with George Kaufman, was entered into evidence, basically to show she was an unfit mother. Having the diary entered into evidence meant it was available to the public. This was the Sex Scandal to end All Sex Scandals. The diary was quoted in mainstream newspapers, her “sin” broadcast around the world. Mary Astor was shooting Dodsworth at the time, and then showing up to court, fragile and tear-streaked, and every second of it was photographed. Tabloid field-day.

Astor was a bundle of contradictions, and when she was good, there was nobody better.

In 2017, illustrator Edward Sorel came out with a book about what was known as Mary Astor’s “purple diary” and I absolutely fell in love with it.

It’s filled with Sorel’s whimsical illustrations: he is a FAN of Mary Astor, but he had no idea about the “sex scandal of 1936” until he discovered a bunch of newspaper clippings underneath the floorboards of a new apartment. He became fascinated. Riveted. A lifelong obsessive. His book, Mary Astor’s Purple Diary, is the result of that life-long obsession. I wrote about it for Ebert.

Happy birthday, Mary Astor!

 
 
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