Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,781

This is the grave of Teresa Wright, as well as the remains of other good people who left their bodies to the Yale University School of Medicine for research purposes in training doctors.

Born in 1918 in Harlem, Muriel Wright was a middle class child, the daughter of an insurance agent. However, her parents divorced when she was a child. She grew up in Maplewood, New Jersey. She was into the theater from the time she was a girl. In 1936, she had a life-changing moment. She saw Helen Hayes perform in Victoria Regina on Broadway. Seeing such a great actor in person made Wright want to do this professionally too. She was good at it too. She got a scholarship in 1938 to the Wharf Theater in Provincetown, Massachusetts, already a major artists colony. She also started going by Teresa, which was her middle name anyway.

In 1938, Wright moved to New York and soon was hired as the understudy to first Dorothy McGuire and then Martha Scott in Thornton Wilder‘s initial production of Our Town. When Scott went to Hollywood for the film version (McGuire had already departed), Wright took over the part and did well. Then in 1939, she was cast in Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse’s Life with Father, a comedy play that remains the longest running non-musical in Broadway history to this day. Wright’s role wasn’t huge, but it was significant. She began to attract attention for her work. In 1940, Samuel Goldwyn came to see the play and he was impressed by her. He talked to her backstage about the possibilities for her in Hollywood. She was quite interested.

Good call by Goodwyn here. He immediately cast her as Bette Davis’ daughter in the 1941 adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes. Again, she did well. What’s interesting about her early in her career is how much power she took over her own career. There’s no good way to summarize this. So let me just quote her contract:

The aforementioned Teresa Wright shall not be required to pose for photographs in a bathing suit unless she is in the water. Neither may she be photographed running on the beach with her hair flying in the wind. Nor may she pose in any of the following situations: In shorts, playing with a cocker spaniel; digging in a garden; whipping up a meal; attired in firecrackers and holding skyrockets for the Fourth of July; looking insinuatingly at a turkey for Thanksgiving; wearing a bunny cap with long ears for Easter; twinkling on prop snow in a skiing outfit while a fan blows her scarf; assuming an athletic stance while pretending to hit something with a bow and arrow.

Basically, “I’m not going to look like a sexpot or an idiot.” And she got away with it! Goldwyn must really have liked her!

Well, Wright got nominated for Best Supporting Actress for The Three Foxes, so the contract paid off. Then she got nominated as the leading lady in Pride of the Yankees, the Lou Gehrig biopic with Gary Cooper. She was nominated for Best Actress for that. She didn’t win, but the same year, she was also nominated for Best Supporting Actress for Mrs. Miniver with Greer Garson and she won for that! 3 movies, 3 Academy Award nominations! No one else has ever done that in the history of cinema.

Now able to take the best roles, she followed this with a great role in Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, which is one of his most underrated films and in my view is a lot better than The Birds at least. That’s really up there with Vertigo and North by Northwest and The 39 Steps and Strangers on a Train. Hitchcock thought she was great, but she wasn’t one of his frosty blondes that he could use as foils/love interests his leading men, so she didn’t become part of his normal casting. Then she received major kudos for her work in The Best Years of Our Lives, though the Academy chose to find other movies to give the Actress nominations to in 1947, pretty much the only categories not won by that film.

But things started not working out so well and the reason was Wright’s staunch independence. Goldwyn was only willing to put up with so much and he got sick of working with her, despite her great talent and the high quality of her films. She was let out of her contract in 1948 and after that, she mostly appeared in not great films, though the reviews usually noted that in fact she was personally quite good in them. The reality of the studio system is that you had to suck up to a bunch of assholes to get to be the big star and if you were just that unwilling–and Wright certainly was that unwilling–then it wasn’t going to happen for you. So it was to the B movies. She actually wrote a public letter when Goldwyn dumped her. It read:

I would like to say that I never refused to perform the services required of me; I was unable to perform them because of ill health. I accept Mr. Goldwyn’s termination of my contract without protest—in fact, with relief. The types of contracts standardized in the motion picture industry between players and producers are archaic in form and absurd in concept. I am determined never to set my name to another one … I have worked for Mr. Goldwyn seven years because I consider him a great producer, and he has paid me well, but in the future I shall gladly work for less if by doing so I can retain my hold upon the common decencies without which the most glorified job becomes intolerable.

Wright was a pretty brave woman!

But it did cost Wright a successful career. She did some movies with that other troublemaker of the midcentury studio system, Robert Mitchum, but none of them were that great. She didn’t care that much it seemed. The rise of TV gave her plenty of one off work and she went back to Broadway. Also, was she on The Love Boat? Goddamn right she was. Whenever looking up an actor of this era, see if they had a Love Boat appearance. They did at least half the time. She very occasionally showed up in films later in life, including in 1980’s Somewhere in Time, 1988’s The Good Mother, and her final role in Coppola’s adaptation of John Grisham’s The Rainmaker, in 1997.

Now, Wright seems pretty great. But there’s one unforgivable character flaw–she was a huge New York Yankees superfan, going back to when she did Pride of the Yankees. Sickening. She threw out the first pitch in 1998. In fact, when she died in 2005, at the age of 86, her name was announced as a Yankee who had passed away over the last year during their annual Old Timers Game.

Despite this, as you can see, Wright did one last beautiful act, which was donate her body to the Yale University School of Medicine. At some point, Yale buried the ashes of the people who did this at the Evergreen Cemetery, New Haven, Connecticut, including those of Wright. I’ve never seen a grave like this before and so this is a shout out to everyone who leaves their bodies to science.

If you would like this series to visit other people nominated for Best Supporting Actress for work in 1942, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Agnes Moorhead, nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her work in The Magnificent Ambersons, is in Dayton, Ohio and Susan Peters is in Glendale, California. And Peters is one sad story to tell. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.