Mary Astor the biography

Mary Astor, Actress, - Biography

Actress

Height 5 foot 6 ( 1 m 68 ).

Birth name Lucile Vasconcellos Langhanke
Born May 3, 1906, Quincy, Illinois, USA
Died September 25, 1987, Woodland Hills, California, USA

Mary Astor was an Academy Award-winning American actress. Most famous for her role as Brigid O'Shaunessy in The Maltese Falcon (1941) opposite Humphrey Bogart, Astor began her long motion picture career as a teenager in the silent movies of the early 1920s.

She eventually made a successful transition to talkies, but almost saw her career destroyed due to public scandal in the mid-1930s. She was sued for support by her parents & was later branded an adulterous wife by her ex-husband during a custody fight over her daughter. Overcoming these stumbling blocks in her private life, Astor went on to even greater success on the screen, eventually winning the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of Sandra Kovak in The Great Lie (1941). Director Lindsay Anderson said of her: "...that when two or three who love the cinema are gathered together, the name of Mary Astor always comes up, & everybody agrees that she was an actress of special attraction, whose qualities of depth & reality always seemed to illuminate the parts she played." She continued to act in movies, on television & on stage into the 1960s. She retired from the screen in 1964.

Astor was also the author of five novels. Her autobiography became a bestseller, as did her later book, A Life on Film, which was specifically about her career.

She was born Lucile Vasconcellos Langhanke in Quincy, Illinois in May 3, 1906. Mary was the only child of Otto Ludwig Langhanke (October 2, 1871-February 3, 1943) & Helen Marie Vasconcellos (April 19, 1881-January 18, 1947).

Her father, who was born in Berlin, immigrated to the United States from Germany in 1891 & became a naturalized citizen; her mother was born in Jacksonville, Illinois, of Portuguese & Irish extraction. They married on August 3, 1904 in Lyons, Kansas. Otto was a German teacher at Quincy High School until the U.S. entered World War I. He then began doing light farming. Helen, who had always wanted to be an actress, began teaching drama & elocution.

Lucile was homeschooled in academics & taught to play the piano by her father, who insisted she practice daily. In 1919, she sent a photograph of herself to a beauty contest in Motion Picture Magazine & became a finalist. Her father then moved the family to Chicago, where he took a position teaching German in public schools. Lucile took drama lessons & appeared in various amateur stage plays.

The following year, she sent another photograph to the magazine & again became a finalist, this time being named runner-up in the national contest. Her father then moved the family to New York, in order for his pretty daughter to become an actress in motion pictures. He managed all her affairs from September 1920 to June 1930.

A Manhattan photographer, Charles Albin, saw a photograph & asked the young girl with haunting eyes & long auburn hair, whose nickname was "Rusty," to pose for him. The Albin photographs were seen by Harry Durant of Famous Players-Lasky & Lucile was signed to a six-month contract with Paramount. Her name was changed to Mary Astor during a conference between studio chief Jesse Lasky, gossip columnist Louella Parsons & producer Walter Wanger.

Silent movie career
At age 14, she debuted with her new stage name in the 1921 film Sentimental Tommy, but her small part in a dream sequence wound up on the cutting room floor. Paramount let her contract lapse. She then appeared in some movie shorts with sequences based on famous paintings. She received critical recognition for the 1921 two-reeler The Beggar Maid. Her first feature-length movie was John Smith (1922), which was followed that same year by The Man Who Played God. In 1923, she & her parents moved to Hollywood.

After appearing in several larger roles at various studios, she was signed by Paramount again, this time to a one-year contract at $500 a week. She had appeared in several more movies when John Barrymore saw a photograph of her in a magazine & wanted her cast in his upcoming movie. On loan-out to Warner Bros., she starred with him in Beau Brummel (1924). The older actor wooed the young actress, but their engagement ended when he became involved with Dolores Costello.

In 1925, Astor's parents bought a Moorish style mansion with one acre of land known as "Moorcroft" in the hills above Hollywood. They lived lavishly on her earnings. Moorcroft, which is still standing, was, rented by Charlie Chaplin before the Langhankes bought it. It was from this mansion that Astor, fed up with her father's constant badgering to practice the piano, climbed from her second floor bedroom window & walked down to Hollywood Boulevard, as recounted in her memoirs.

Astor went on appearing in movies at various studios. When her Paramount contract ended in 1925, she was signed at Warner Bros. Among her assignments was another role with John Barrymore, this time in Don Juan (1926). She was named one of the WAMPAS Baby Stars in 1926, along with Mary Brian, Dolores Costello, Joan Crawford, Dolores Del Rio, Janet Gaynor, & Fay Wray.

On loan-out to 20th Century Fox, Astor starred in Dressed To Kill (1928), which received good reviews. That same year, she starred in the sophisticated comedy Dry Martini at Fox. She later said that, while working on the latter, she "absorbed & assumed something of the atmosphere & emotional climate of the picture." She said it offered "a new & exciting point of view; with its specious doctrine of self-indulgence, it rushed into the vacuum of my moral sense & captivated me completely." When her Warner Bros. contract ended, she was signed at Fox for $3,750 a week.

In 1928, she & director Kenneth Hawks were married at her family home, Moorcroft. He gave her a Packard automobile for a wedding gift & they moved into a home high up on Lookout Mountain in Los Angeles above Beverly Hills.

As the movie industry made the transition to talkies, Fox gave her a sound test, which she failed because the studio found her voice to be too deep. Though this was probably due to early sound equipment & the inexperience of technicians, the studio released her from her contract & she found herself out of work for eight months in 1929.

New beginnings
Astor took voice training & singing lessons during her time off, but no roles were offered. Her acting career was then given a boost by her friend, Florence Eldridge (wife of Fredric March), whom she confided in. Eldridge, who was to star in the stage play Among the Married at the Majestic Theatre in Downtown Los Angeles, recommended Astor for the second female lead. The play was a success & her voice was deemed suitable, being described as low & vibrant.

She was happy to be back at work, but her happiness soon ended. On January 3, 1930, while filming sequences for the Fox movie Such Men Are Dangerous, Kenneth Hawks was killed in a mid-air plane crash over the Pacific. Astor had just finished a matinee performance at the Majestic when Florence Eldridge came to her with the news. She was rushed from the theatre & taken to Eldridge's apartment; a replacement, Doris Lloyd, stepped in for the next show. Astor remained with her friend, Eldridge, at her apartment for some time, but she soon went back to work. Shortly after her husband's death, she debuted in her first "talkie", Ladies Love Brutes (1930) at Paramount, which co-starred friend Fredric March.

While her career picked up, her private life remained troubled. After working on several more movies, she suffered delayed shock over her husband's death & had a nervous breakdown. During the months of her illness, she was attended to by Dr. Franklyn Thorpe, whom she later married.

Astor had four husbands, director Kenneth Hawks (married February 26, 1928-his death on January 3, 1930); physician & surgeon Franklyn Thorpe (married June 29, 1931-divorced 1936); insurance salesman Manuel del Campo (married February 1936-divorced 1941); & stockbroker Thomas Wheelock (married December 25, 1945-divorced 1955). She & Thorpe had one daughter, Marylyn Hauoli Thorpe (born June 16, 1932); she & del Campo had one son, Anthony Paul "Tono" del Campo (born June 5, 1939).

In May 1932, the Thorpes purchased a yacht & sailed to Hawaii. Astor was pregnant, but the birth was scheduled for August. Her daughter was born in June in Honolulu, her name being a combination of the names of her parents. Her middle name, Hauoli, means "To sing with joy."

When they returned to Southern California, Astor began freelancing & accepted the pivotal role of Barbara Willis in Red Dust (1932) at MGM with Clark Gable & Jean Harlow. In late 1932, Astor signed a featured player contract with Warner Bros. Besides spending lavishly, her parents invested in the stock market, which turned out in many instances to be unprofitable. They still lived in Moorcroft, which Astor dubbed a "white elephant" & refused to maintain. She had to turn to the Motion Picture Relief Fund in 1933 to pay her bills.

Unhappy with her marriage, she took a break from movie making in 1933 & went to New York by herself. While there, enjoying a whirlwind social life, she met the playwright George Kaufman & had an affair, which she documented in her diary.

Scandals
In March 1934, Astor was sued by her parents for support & a public family feud burst out violently. The Langhankes said they did not have enough money for the necessities of life; the only money they had received from their daughter in the last six months was $60 in grocery coupons, & they had to sell some of their furniture to survive. They also cited a foreclosure notice on their home, saying their daughter would not help them pay the mortgage.

However, despite the Depression, Otto had continued to improve their estate. He then took out an $18,000 loan & had a swimming pool installed, which Astor said neither of them ever used & was a waste of money, & he could not afford to pay on the remaining $15,000 incumbrance. Astor said that all of her earnings went to her parents until 1930, being deposited by the studio directly into their bank account, & she received a small allowance. She then decided it was necessary for her to look out for her own future. She gave them the house in June of that year, & for a year thereafter gave them $1,000 per month. In addition, in March 1931, she loaned them $2,515.19, which they did not repay & she never asked for.

She said that she told them in March 1933 that she could not afford to support them in their expensive home, which cost more than the one she & her husband & daughter were living in. She offered them an allowance of $100 per month if they moved from the mansion; she also offered to set them up in a suitable house in San Mateo County, together with food & utilities, but they did not accept either offer. Their lawyer responded that a daughter could not dictate to her parents where they could or could not live.

The judge ruled that she should give her parents $100 per month. Moorcroft, now valued at $200,000, went on the auction block & sold for only $21,500. Otto was outraged & did not want to accept the bid, but the auctioneer said they had a signed contract, the buyer had deposited the proper deposit, & the sale was final.

In the meantime, Astor's marriage to Franklyn Thorpe continued to deteriorate. She learned from Kaufman that Thorpe had talked to him about their affair. When the inevitable confrontation came, Thorpe told her he would name Kaufman in a divorce suit. He said that if she would let him take their daughter, Marylyn, she could have her back after six months to keep for six months. She believed that later on she could get custody of Marylyn & avoid bad publicity.

In April 1935, Thorpe divorced her in an uncontested suit & gained sole custody of their daughter. In July 1936, while working on Dodsworth with Walter Huston & Ruth Chatterton, Astor sued to gain sole custody, as well as for the recovery of stocks & property paid for by her movie earnings, or the monetary equivalent, & a vicious battle broke out that was also well documented by the press.

Thorpe cited her adultery with Kaufman & introduced excerpts of her diary as evidence of the affair. Astor said he had stolen her diary & that most of the passages submitted were forgeries. She said that she was intimidated into not contesting custody when he threatened to ruin her career. She said he assertedly threatened to deprive her of her daughter's companionship unless she transferred the securities to him, which she did shortly before the divorce. She further asserted that he was busy with his practice & unable to properly rear the child.

Excerpts of what she wrote about her marriage & affair with Kaufman were then released by Thorpe's lawyers to the press, who dubbed it the "purple diary," although it was actually penned in Aztec brown ink & not purple, & it became headline news. Although the excerpts in the papers were fairly harmless, with romantic & sentimental chatter & no intimate details, lurid tales of sexually explicit contents began to circulate. No one ever actually read the authentic diary, however, & such reports of its contents were purely speculative.

When Thorpe surrendered the diary to the court it was impounded & the full contents never revealed. The judge was only concerned with the welfare of the child. Astor wanted her diary back, while Thorpe asserted it should be returned to him. The judge ordered that the diary be stored in a safe deposit box, sealed against prying eyes. In April 1952, with no objection from Astor or Thorpe, the diary was destroyed, unread, by order of the court.

Astor received joint custody of her daughter. Marylyn lived with her mother during the school year & with her father during summer vacation. She spent Christmas with both parents.

Career continues
Fortunately, the scandals caused no harm to Astor's career, which was actually revitalized because of the custody fight & the huge amount of publicity it generated; Dodsworth was released to rave revues, & the public's acceptance assured the studios that she was still a viable commercial property.

In 1937, she returned to the stage in well-received productions of Noel Coward's Tonight at 8:30, The Astonished Heart, & Still Life. She also began doing regular performances on radio. Some of her best movies were still to come, including The Prisoner of Zenda (1937), John Ford's The Hurricane (1937), & Brigham Young (1940).

Astor is probably most famous for her role as Brigid O'Shaunessy, the scheming temptress who murders Sam Spade's partner, Miles Archer, in John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941) opposite Humphrey Bogart, with Peter Lorre & Sydney Greenstreet.

Astor's elevator ride down with police at the end of The Maltese Falcon was seen by some as symbolic of a final trip to hell.Although Spade is an amoral womanizer, something in Brigid causes him to let down his guard; he actually feels love for her. Despite his feelings, the climax of the movie is when he forces her to confess that she is the murderer. He loves her, but something in him is afraid that will weaken him.

Spade regrets sending her to jail, maybe to her death, but his fear about himself is stronger than his regret. As much as he cannot bear his loss, he "won't be played" & can bear that image of himself even less.

Another noteworthy performance was her Oscar-winning role as Sandra Kovak, the selfish, self-centered concert pianist, who willingly gives up her child, in The Great Lie (1941) starring Bette Davis & George Brent.

Davis wanted Astor cast in the role after watching her screen test & seeing her play Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1. She then recruited Astor to collaborate with her on rewriting the script, which Davis felt was mediocre & needed work to make it more interesting. Astor further followed Davis's advice & sported a brazen bobbed hairdo for the role. The soundtrack of the movie during the scenes where she plays the concerto, with violent hand movements on the piano keys, was actually recorded with Max Rabinovitch playing. Astor let Davis run the show, with no objection, & they became good friends. Davis deliberately stepped back to allow Astor to shine in her key scenes. As a result of her performance, Astor won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.

Astor was not propelled into the upper echelon of movie stars by these successes, however. She always declined offers of starring in her own right. Not wanting the responsibility of top billing & having to "carry the picture," she preferred the security of being a featured player.

In 1942 she was reunited with Humphrey Bogart & Sydney Greenstreet in John Huston's Across the Pacific. She also played the Princess Centimillia in The Palm Beach Story.

In February 1943, Otto Langhanke died in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital as a result of a heart attack complicated by influenza. His wife & daughter were both at his bedside.

That same year, Astor signed a seven-year contract with MGM, which turned out to be a regrettable mistake. She was kept busy playing what she considered mediocre mother roles. After Meet Me In St. Louis (1944), the studio allowed her to make her Broadway debut in Many Happy Returns (1945). The play was a miserable failure, but Astor received good reviews.

On loan-out to 20th Century Fox, she played a wealthy widow in Claudia & David (1946). She was also loaned to Paramount to play Fritzi Haller in Desert Fury (1947) in which she played the tough owner of a saloon & casino in a small mining town.

Before Helen Langhanke died of a heart ailment in January 1947, Astor said she sat in the hospital room with her mother, who was delirious & did not know her, & listened quietly as Helen told her all about terrible, selfish Lucile. After her death, Astor said she spent countless hours copying her mother's diary so she could read it & was surprised to learn how much she was hated.

Back at MGM, Astor went on being cast in undistinguished, colorless mother roles. One exception was when she played a prostitute in the film noir Act of Violence (1948). The last straw came when she was cast as Marmee March in Little Women (1949). Astor found no redemption in playing what she considered another humdrum mother & became despondent. The studio wanted to renew her contract, promising to give her better roles, but she declined the offer.

Middle years
At the same time, Astor's drinking was getting much worse. She admitted to having a problem with alcohol as far back as the 1930s, but it had never interfered with her work schedule or performance. She hit bottom in 1949 & went into a sanitarium for alcoholics.

In 1951, she made a frantic call to her doctor & told him she had taken too many sleeping pills. She was taken to a hospital & the police reported that she had attempted suicide, this being her third overdose in two years, & the story made headline news. She maintained it had been an accident.

That same year, she joined Alcoholics Anonymous & converted to Roman Catholicism. She credited her recovery to a priest, Peter Ciklic, also a practicing psychologist, who encouraged her to write about her experiences as part of therapy. She also separated from her husband, Thomas Wheelock, but did not actually divorce him until 1955.

In 1952, she was cast in the leading role of the stage play Time of the Cuckoo, which was later made into the movie Summertime (1955), & subsequently toured with it. After the tour, Astor lived in New York for four years & worked in the theatre & on television.

Her TV debut was in The Missing Years (1954) for Kraft Television Theatre. She acted frequently in TV during the ensuing years & appeared on most of the big shows of the time, including The United States Steel Hour, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Rawhide, Dr. Kildare, Burke's Law, & Ben Casey. She also starred on Broadway in The Starcross Story (1954), which was another failure.

She returned to Southern California in 1956. She then went on a successful theatre tour of Don Juan in Hell directed by Agnes Moorehead & co-starring Ricardo Montalban.

Astor's memoir, My Story: An Autobiography, was published in 1959, becoming a sensation for its day & a bestseller. It was the result of Father Ciklic urging her to write. Though she spoke of her troubled personal life, her parents, her marriages, the scandals, her battle with alcoholism, & other things about her life, she did not mention the movie industry or her career in any detail. In 1971, another book was published, A Life on Film, where she discussed her career. It too became a bestseller. Astor also tried her hand at fiction, writing the novels The Incredible Charley Carewe (1960), The Image of Kate (1962), The O'Conners (1964), Jahre und Tage (1964) (a German translation of The Image of Kate), Goodbye, Darling, be Happy (1965), & A Place Called Saturday (1968).

She appeared in several movies during this time, including A Stranger in My Arms (1959). She made a comeback in Return to Peyton Place (1961) playing Roberta Carter, the domineering mother who insists the "shocking" novel written by Allison Mackenzie should be banned from the school library, & received good reviews for her performance.

Later life
After taking a trip around the world in 1964, Astor was lured away from her Malibu home, where she was spending time gardening & working on her third novel, to make what she decided would be her final movie appearance.

When she was offered the small role as a key figure in the murder mystery Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte, starring her friend, Bette Davis, Astor decided it would serve as her swan song in the movie business. After more than 100 movies during a career spanning 44 years, she turned in her SAG card & retired.

She later moved to Fountain Valley, California, where she lived near her son, Tono del Campo, & his family until 1976. Suffering from a chronic heart condition, she then moved to a small cottage on the grounds of the Motion Picture & Television Country House, the industry's retirement facility in Woodland Hills, where she had her own private table when she chose to eat in the resident dining room.

While living there, Astor had a heart attack, two strokes & developed emphysema. She died at age 81 of respiratory failure due to pulmonary emphysema while a patient in the hospital that is part of the Motion Picture House complex. She is interred in Holy Cross Cemetery, Culver City.

Mary Astor has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6701 Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood.

One of her famous quotes detailed the 5 stages of her career: “Who’s Mary Astor? Get me Mary Astor. Get me a Mary Astor type. Get me a young Mary Astor. Who’s Mary Astor?"

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