Jean Arthur (born Gladys Georgianna Greene; October 17, 1900 – June 19, 1991) was an American film and theater actress whose career began in silent films in the early 1920s and lasted until the early 1950s.
Arthur had feature roles in three Frank Capra films: Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) with Gary Cooper, You Can't Take It with You (1938) co-starring James Stewart, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), also starring Stewart. These three films all championed the "everyday heroine", personified by Arthur. She also co-starred with Cary Grant in the adventure-drama Only Angels Have Wings (1939) and in the comedy-drama The Talk of the Town (1942). She starred as the lead in the acclaimed and highly successful comedy films The Devil and Miss Jones (1941) and A Foreign Affair (1948), the latter of which she starred alongside Marlene Dietrich. Arthur was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress in 1944 for her performance in The More the Merrier (1943), a comedy which also starred Joel McCrea.
James Harvey wrote in his history of the romantic comedy: "No one was more closely identified with the screwball comedy than Jean Arthur. So much was she part of it, so much was her star personality defined by it, that the screwball style itself seems almost unimaginable without her." She has been called "the quintessential comedic leading lady". Her last film performance was non-comedic, playing the homesteader's wife in George Stevens's Shane in 1953.
Like Greta Garbo, Arthur was well known in Hollywood for her aversion to publicity; she was very guarded about her privacy and rarely signed autographs or granted interviews. LIFE observed in an article in its 11 March 1940 issue, "Next to Garbo, Jean Arthur is Hollywood's reigning mystery woman." As well as recoiling from interviews, after a certain age, she avoided photographers and refused to become a part of any kind of publicity.
Jean Arthur was whimsical without being silly, unique without being nutty, a theatrical personality who was an untheatrical person. She was a delight to work with and to know.
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Early life
Arthur was born Gladys Georgianna Greene in Plattsburgh, New York, to parents Johanna Augusta Nelson and Hubert Sidney Greene. Gladys' maternal grandparents immigrated from Norway to the American West after the Civil War. Her paternal ancestors immigrated from England to Rhode Island in the second half of the 17th century. During the 1790s, Nathaniel Greene helped found the town of St. Albans, Vermont, where his great-grandson, Hubert Greene, was born.
Arthur had three older brothers.
The product of a nomadic childhood, Arthur lived at times in Saranac Lake, New York; Jacksonville, Florida, and Schenectady, New York. The family lived on and off in Westbrook, Maine, from 1908 to 1915, while Arthur's father worked at Lamson Studios in Portland. Relocating in 1915 to New York City, the family settled in the Washington Heights neighborhood of upper Manhattan.
Arthur dropped out of high school in her junior year due to a "change in family circumstances".
Career
Silent film
Discovered by Fox Film Studios while she was doing commercial modeling in New York City in the early 1920s, the newly named Jean Arthur landed a one-year contract and debuted in the silent film Cameo Kirby (1923), directed by John Ford. She reputedly took her stage name from two of her greatest heroes, Joan of Arc (Jeanne d'Arc) and King Arthur. The studio was at the time looking for new American sweethearts with sufficient sex appeal to interest the Jazz Age audiences. Arthur was remodeled as such a personality, a flapper.
Following the small role in Cameo Kirby, she received her first female lead role in The Temple of Venus (1923), a plotless tale about a group of dancing nymphs. Dissatisfied with her lack of acting talent, the film's director, Henry Otto, replaced Arthur with actress Mary Philbin during the third day of shooting. Arthur agreed with the director: "There wasn't a spark from within. I was acting like a mechanical doll personality. I thought I was disgraced for life."
Arthur was planning on leaving the California film industry for good, but reluctantly stayed due to her contract, and appeared in comedy shorts, instead. Despite lacking the required talent, Arthur liked acting, which she perceived as an "outlet". To acquire some fame, she registered herself in the Los Angeles city directory as a photo player operator, as well as appearing in a promotional film for a new Encino nightclub, but to no avail.
Change came when one day she showed up at the lot of Action Pictures, which produced B Westerns, and impressed its owner, Lester F. Scott, Jr., with her presence. He decided to take a chance on a complete unknown, and she was cast in over 20 Westerns in a two-year period. Only receiving $25 a picture, Arthur suffered from difficult working conditions: "The films were generally shot on location, often in the desert near Los Angeles, under a scorching sun that caused throats to parch and make-up to run. Running water was nowhere to be found, and even outhouses were a luxury not always present. The extras on these films were often real cowboys, tough men who were used to roughing it and who had little use for those who were not." The films were moderately successful in second-rate Midwestern theaters, though Arthur received no official attention. Aside from appearing in films for Action Pictures between 1924 and 1926, she worked in some independent Westerns, including The Drug Store Cowboy (1925), and Westerns for Poverty Row, as well as having an uncredited bit part in Buster Keaton's Seven Chances (1925) as the receptionist.
Transition to sound film
With the rise of the talkies in the late 1920s, Arthur was among the many silent-screen actors of Paramount Pictures initially unwilling to adapt to sound films. Upon realizing that the craze for sound films was not a phase, she met with sound coach Roy Pomeroy. Her distinctive, throaty voice – in addition to some stage training on Broadway in the early 1930s – eventually helped make her a star in the talkies, but it initially prevented directors from casting her in films. In her early talkies, this "throaty" voice is still missing, and whether it had not yet emerged or whether she hid it remains unclear. Her all-talking film debut was The Canary Murder Case (1929), in which she co-starred opposite William Powell and Louise Brooks. Arthur impressed only a few with the film, and later claimed that at the time she was a "very poor actress ... awfully anxious to improve, but ... inexperienced so far as genuine training was concerned."
In the early years of talking pictures, Paramount was known for contracting Broadway actors with experienced vocals and impressive background references. Arthur was not among these actors, and she struggled for recognition in the film industry. Her personal involvement with rising Paramount executive David O. Selznick – despite his relationship with Irene Mayer Selznick – proved substantial; she was put on the map and became selected as one of the WAMPAS Baby Stars in 1929. Following a silent B Western called Stairs of Sand (1929), she received some positive notices when she played the female lead in the lavish production of The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu (1929). Arthur was given more publicity assignments, which she carried out, though she immensely disliked posing for photographers and giving interviews.
Through Selznick, Arthur received her "best role to date" opposite famous sex symbol Clara Bow in the early sound film The Saturday Night Kid (1929). Of the two female leads, Arthur was thought to have "the better part", and director Edward Sutherland claimed, "Arthur was so good that we had to cut and cut to keep her from stealing the picture" from Bow. While some argued that Bow resented Arthur for having the "better part," Bow encouraged Arthur to make the most of the production. Arthur later praised her working experience with Bow: "[Bow] was so generous, no snootiness or anything. She was wonderful to me." The film was a moderate success, and The New York Times wrote that the film would have been "merely commonplace, were it not for Jean Arthur, who plays the catty sister with a great deal of skill."
Broadway
In late 1931, Arthur returned to New York City, where a Broadway agent cast Arthur in an adaptation of Lysistrata, which opened at the Riviera Theater on January 24, 1932. A few months later, she made her Broadway debut in Foreign Affairs opposite Dorothy Gish and Osgood Perkins. Though the play did not fare well and closed after 23 performances, critics were impressed by her work on stage. She next won the female lead in The Man Who Reclaimed His Head, which opened on September 8, 1932, at the Broadhurst Theatre to mostly mixed notices for Arthur; negative reviews for the play caused the production to be halted quickly. Arthur returned to California for the holidays, and appeared in the RKO film The Past of Mary Holmes (1933), her first film in two years.
Back on Broadway, Arthur continued to appear in small plays that received little attention. Critics, however, continued to praise her in their reviews. In this period, Arthur arguably developed confidence in her acting craft for the first time. On the contrast between films in Hollywood and plays in New York, Arthur commented:
I don't think Hollywood is the place to be yourself. The individual ought to find herself before coming to Hollywood. On the stage I found myself to be in a different world. The individual counted. The director encouraged me and I learned how to be myself.... I learned to face audiences and to forget them. To see the footlights and not to see them; to gauge the reactions of hundreds of people, and yet to throw myself so completely into a role that I was oblivious to their reaction.
The Curtain Rises, which ran from October to December 1933, was Arthur's first Broadway play in which she was the center of attention. With an improved résumé, she returned to Hollywood in late 1933, and turned down several contract offers until she was asked to meet with an executive from Columbia Pictures. Columbia hired her.
Columbia Pictures
During production of her first Columbia feature, she was offered a long-term contract that promised financial stability for herself and both of her parents. Though hesitant to give up her stage career, Arthur signed the five-year contract on February 14, 1934.
Jean Arthur's first two features for Columbia starred the studio's number-one boxoffice draw, the action star Jack Holt. Holt had a loyal following among fans and exhibitors, and Columbia's president Harry Cohn knew that Arthur would benefit from the exposure, and from working with screen veteran Holt. Whirlpool cast tough-guy Holt as a once-convicted gambler reunited with the daughter he has never seen. Arthur played the daughter with sincerity and sympathy, while Holt displayed a tenderness and compassion never before seen in his two-fisted melodramas. The Hollywood Reporter observed, "Particularly touching and well done are [Holt's] scenes with his daughter. He is given splendid assistance by Jean Arthur, and by the director, Roy William Neill. Without overplaying or mawkish sentimentality, these scenes have a natural, human quality that counts."
Holt and Arthur were teamed a few months later for a follow-up, The Defense Rests (1934); Arthur's character, fresh out of law school, wants to work for a celebrated criminal lawyer, played by Holt, and soon learns the inside story of his success.
Arthur's success in the Holt pictures had a salutary effect on the actress's outlook, according to Picture Play:
Her entire personality has changed, and from a somewhat immature actress of nice but no startling ability she has blossomed into a distinctive artist, and only the future can tell how high she will soar... [She] now receives, from Whirlpool alone, approval that any far more experienced actress might spend years in building up.
In 1935, at age 34, Arthur starred opposite Edward G. Robinson in the gangster farce The Whole Town's Talking, also directed by Ford, and her popularity began to rise. It was the first time Arthur portrayed a hard-boiled working girl with a heart of gold, the type of role with which she would be associated for the rest of her career. She enjoyed the acting experience and working opposite Robinson, who remarked in his biography that it was a "delight to work with and know" Arthur. By the time of the film's release, her hair, naturally brunette throughout the silent-film portion of her career, was bleached blonde and mostly stayed that way. She was known for maneuvering to be photographed and filmed almost exclusively from the left; Arthur felt that her left was her better side, and worked hard to keep it in the fore. Director Frank Capra recalled producer Harry Cohn's description of Jean Arthur's imbalanced profile: "half of it's angel, and the other half horse."
Later career and retirements
Arthur announced her retirement when her contract with Columbia Pictures expired in 1944. She reportedly ran through the studio's streets, shouting "I'm free, I'm free!" For the next several years, she turned down virtually all film offers, the two exceptions being Billy Wilder's A Foreign Affair (1948), in which she played a congresswoman and rival of Marlene Dietrich's, and as a homesteader's wife in Stevens' classic Western Shane (1953), which turned out to be the biggest box-office hit of her career. The latter was her final film, and the only color film in which she appeared.
Arthur's postretirement work in theater was intermittent, somewhat curtailed by her unease and discomfort about working in public. Capra claimed she vomited in her dressing room between scenes, yet emerged each time to perform a flawless take. According to John Oller's biography, Jean Arthur: The Actress Nobody Knew (1997), Arthur developed a kind of stage fright punctuated with bouts of psychosomatic illnesses. A prime example was in 1945, when she was cast in the lead of the Garson Kanin play Born Yesterday. Her nerves and insecurity got the better of her and she left the production before it reached Broadway, opening the door for a then-unknown Judy Holliday to take the part. Nevertheless, Arthur appeared as Peter Pan in the 1950 Broadway musical Peter Pan.
After Shane and A Foreign Affair, Arthur went into retirement for 11 years.
In 1965, the reclusive Arthur returned to show business to star in an episode of Gunsmoke, as Julie Blane in season 10, episode 24's "Thursday's Child". In 1966, she took on the role of Patricia Marshall, an attorney, on her own television sitcom, The Jean Arthur Show, which was cancelled midseason by CBS after only 12 episodes.
In 1967, Arthur was coaxed back to Broadway to appear as a Midwestern "spinster" who falls in with a group of hippies in the play The Freaking Out of Stephanie Blake. In his book The Season, William Goldman reconstructed the disastrous production, which eventually closed during previews when Arthur refused to go on.
Arthur next decided to teach drama, first at Vassar College and then the North Carolina School of the Arts.
Personal life
Arthur's first marriage, to photographer Julian Anker in 1928, was annulled after one day. She married producer Frank Ross, Jr. in 1932. They divorced in 1949.
Arthur lived in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, for 30 years, and died from heart failure on June 19, 1991, at the age of 90. No funeral service was held. She was cremated, and her remains were scattered off the coast of Point Lobos, California.
Driftwood Cottage
Driftwood Cottage, in Carmel Point, California, was once the home of Arthur and her mother Johanna Greene. Arthur remodeled the house and created a large outdoor garden, with landscape artist George Hoy, in a Japanese architecture style, including a Japanese bronze dragon gate latch.
Legacy
Upon her death, film reviewer Charles Champlin wrote the following in the Los Angeles Times:
To at least one teenager in a small town (though I'm sure we were a multitude), Jean Arthur suggested strongly that the ideal woman could be – ought to be – judged by her spirit as well as her beauty ... The notion of the woman as a friend and confidante, as well as someone you courted and were nuts about, someone whose true beauty was internal rather than external, became a full-blown possibility as we watched Jean Arthur.
For her contribution to the motion-picture industry, Arthur has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6333 Hollywood Blvd.
In 2014, Arthur was inducted into the Hall of Great Western Performers at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City.
In January 2026, she was recognized as Turner Classic Movies Star of the Month.
