The toughest woman in Hollywood — orphaned at four, chorus girl at thirteen, film star at twenty-two. She could do comedy, noir, melodrama, and Western with equal command, and she never once asked anyone's permission.
Portrait · Barbara Stanwyck
Born Ruby Catherine Stevens on July 16, 1907, in Brooklyn, New York — her mother died when she was four, her father abandoned the family shortly after, and she was raised in a series of foster homes and boarding houses while her older sister performed in vaudeville. By thirteen she was working in the chorus herself. By sixteen she was dancing in speakeasies. She renamed herself after a Broadway playbill — Barbara Frietchie and Stanwyck's Bar — and got to work.
Frank Capra directed her in Ladies of Leisure (1930) and immediately saw something that couldn't be manufactured: an emotional directness that bypassed the gap between performance and reality. She cried on cue from take one, never needed two, and never appeared to be acting. Capra called her the best actress he ever worked with.
Her apex came in 1944 with Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity — her Phyllis Dietrichson, the wig-wearing femme fatale who manipulates Fred MacMurray into murdering her husband, remains the definitive noir performance by any actress. She earned her fourth Oscar nomination and didn't win. She never won competitively. The Academy gave her an Honorary Oscar in 1982 and the audience gave her a standing ovation that lasted long enough to be awkward.
She transitioned seamlessly to television in the 1960s, winning three Emmy Awards for The Barbara Stanwyck Show and later The Big Valley, where she played Victoria Barkley — a matriarch so formidable the show ran four seasons on the force of her presence alone.
Phyllis Dietrichson is not sympathetic and Stanwyck plays her that way — cold, precise, using warmth as a tool. The genius is that you watch her manipulations knowing exactly what they are and remain magnetised anyway. The ankle bracelet descending the stairs is cinema's most efficient femme fatale introduction.
The final scene — Stella in the rain outside the window watching her daughter's wedding — is one of Hollywood's great moments of self-abnegating love. Stanwyck makes Stella impossible to condescend to even as the film asks you to pity her. She is too alive for pity.
Stanwyck's comic timing is as exact as her dramatic instincts are true — she manipulates Henry Fonda's hapless Charles Pike with the same cool pleasure she brings to Phyllis Dietrichson's murders, except here it's funny. The leg scene is the finest seduction in screwball comedy.
The entire film takes place in a bedroom, on a telephone — Stanwyck holds it together by sheer force of physical and emotional commitment. Her panic accumulates in layers, each one more credible than the last. A technical masterclass in making a static situation feel like a runaway train.
Her Sugarpuss is all speed and carnality and wit — she runs circles around eight distinguished character actors and Gary Cooper, and she does it with the ease of someone for whom difficulty is just another word for Tuesday. The best screwball performance of any actress not named Katharine Hepburn.
My only problem is finding a way to play my fortieth fallen female in a different way from my thirty-ninth.
Barbara Stanwyck is the great undervalued actor of Hollywood's Golden Age — undervalued not by her peers, who unanimously considered her the best, but by the Academy, which nominated her four times and never gave her the award. The Honorary Oscar in 1982, and the standing ovation that accompanied it, was the profession finally saying in public what it had always said in private.
Her range was genuinely extraordinary. The woman who played Phyllis Dietrichson also played Sugarpuss O'Shea — the femme fatale and the comedienne, separated by three years, both executed with total command. She is the only Hollywood actress of her era whose work in comedy is as remarkable as her work in drama, and vice versa. That double excellence is her singular distinction.