Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,458

This is the grave of Greer Garson.

Born in 1904 in East Ham, Essex, England, Garson grew up fairly well off. Her family was basically connected to the landlord class, although not landlords themselves. So she got a really good education, graduated from King’s College, and then went to France for graduate studies at the University of Grenoble. She majored in French and 18th Century Literature, so it wasn’t an obvious move to acting. But she was interested in it. She got a job to head the research library at a manufacturing company named Lever Brothers. While there, she got to know a guy named George Sanders. She talked about her acting dreams and said he should try it too. He credited her with sparking his interest, so I’d say that worked out OK. Hell, if all she did was inspire the guy who was so great as the vile drama critic in All About Eve, she would be worth remembering.

But of course Garson had a wonderful career of her own, even if her time as a huge star wasn’t really that long. She started acting professionally in 1932, when she was already 27. It didn’t take her long to rise in the British stage scene. In fact, she was in the first ever performance of Shakespeare on television, a version of Twelfth Night in 1937 that was more about if such a thing could be broadcast than something that very many people saw. In any case, Louis Mayer was in London in the same year, looking for British talent to take to Hollywood. He found a real gem in Garson and she was happy to go.

Now, it almost didn’t work out. She was doing a minor role and suffered a severe back injury and couldn’t work for about a year and Mayer almost got rid of her. But he didn’t. She filmed Goodbye Mr. Chips beginning in late 1938 and this made her immediately a very big star, garnering her an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. It would not be her last. She starred in the well-respected 1940 version of Pride and Prejudice. Then in 1942, she received another Best Actress nomination for Blossoms in the Dust, which I have never seen. In any case, that started a remarkable run of five straight years being nominated for an Academy Award, something only achieved by Bette Davis. She became the face of the stoic wife on the homefront during World War II and starred in several roles playing that kind of role. She won Best Actress for Mrs. Miniver, which really tapped into American respect for the British during the war, playing the role of the mother holding down the fort while her boys were at the front. This was also the highest grossing film of 1942, back in the days when people would go see movies that didn’t just have superheroes in them or were based on whichever corporate intellectual property you have erotic fantasies about. Winning that award, she made the longest speech in Oscars history, at about 7 minutes. That record still stands. Exciting stuff! She also starred in Random Harvest that year, which is a World War I veteran story and which also was nominated for some Oscars. Then it was just more nominations–Madame Curie in 1943, Mrs. Parkington in 1944, and The Valley of Decision in 1945. She never won another Oscar, but this was a pretty amazing run.

The postwar period saw Garson’s star dim. She moved from surefire Oscar bait to respected actress whose roles were declining. She nearly drowned on the production of Desire Me, when a sneaker wave knocked her and her costar Richard Hart from the rocks where they were standing during a ocean scene. She hurt her back again then and was out for a bit. She also seems to have burned out a bit on acting. She became a U.S. citizen in 1951 and started moving toward a semi-retirement. Once her MGM contract expired in 1954, she worked only when she felt like it, which wasn’t a ton. She worked on Broadway some and did get one more Oscar nomination, for playing Eleanor Roosevelt in Sunrise at Campobello.

This one is pretty ironic, because Garson became known as one of Hollywood’s most notable right-wingers. She married in 1949, for the third time, to an oil guy and rancher named Buddy Fogelson, They were super rich and so they bought a ranch in New Mexico and mostly bred horses. When they weren’t in New Mexico, they had a huge home in Dallas. Garson became involved in Republican Party politics there and was recruited to run for Congress in her Dallas-area district against a Democratic incumbent, but she decided against that.

As befit nearly any actor of this age, Garson appeared on an episode of The Love Boat. It was her last screen appearance, in 1982. One thing that is fun to do is to watch movies from the 30s and 40s and then see how many of the stars ended up in Love Boat episodes. It’s a lot! That show provided a lot of work for aging Hollywood stars.

Garson died in 1996, at the age of 91. In her final years, she rented a huge part of a hospital, set up what was basically a penthouse apartment, and was taken care of there. Can’t imagine how much she spent on that, but then she definitely had the money.

Greer Garson is buried in Sparkman-Hillcrest Memorial Park, Dallas, Texas.

If you would like to visit other people nominated for Oscars in 1942, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Thanks for the donations yesterday from a couple of people, it had actually been a long time since anything more than a couple bucks had come in. So it is much appreciated. Bette Davis is in Los Angeles and so is Rosalind Russell. Ingrid Bergman is in Sweden if anyone needs to see me in Scandinavia, which I think is an outstanding idea. I actually have a conference in Los Angeles coming up so if anyone wants to help me cover the extra days of expenses I am incurring to visit graves before the conference, I’d appreciate it! Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.