'Everyone knows Mrs Danvers as a byword for menace in Hitchcock's Rebecca and as a poster girl for lesbians in the movies. But only dedicated fans know her brilliant creator.
'This book tells Judith Anderson's life story for the first time. It recovers her career as one of the great stars of stage and television and an important character actress in film. Born in Adelaide, Australia, in 1897, brought up by a determined single mother, she parlayed her rich, velvety voice and ability to give reality to strong emotional roles into stardom on Broadway in the 1920s. Not a conventional beauty, she was alluring, with her beautiful body, perfect dress sense, and striking, volatile personality. After playing glamorous roles, she was recognised as a Leading Lady of the American Stage under the direction of Guthrie McClintic in Hamlet and co-starring with Laurence Olivier and Maurice Evans in Macbeth. Her reputation as a great actress was confirmed by her landmark performance in 1947 in the ancient Greek Medea, adapted for her by her friend, poet Robinson Jeffers. In a long career, she appeared in Medea again in 1982 at the age of 85, playing the Nurse to fellow-Australian Zoe Caldwell's Medea.
'Ambitious and driven, Anderson toured extensively, made numerous highly praised appearances on television, and, after her unforgettable role as Mrs Danvers, was a sought-after character actress in film, playing her last role as Vulcan High Priestess in Star Trek III at the age of 87. She won many awards and was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1960 and Companion of the Order of Australia just before her death in 1992. She had a stormy private life and two short marriages, which, she remarked, were 'much too long.'' (Publication summary)
'Today she haunts popular iconography on multiple digital and visual platforms. In Rebecca, the definitely monochrome film of 1940 directed by Alfred Hitchcock, she is gaunt, implacable, insidious: her black frock as dark as her intentions, luring her terrified victim towards self-annihilation among flickering firelight, transparent drapes, vertiginous cliffs and turbulent waves. In the cultural memory of the twenty-first century, Judith Anderson’s complex multi-media career has almost become subsumed into her portrayal of Mrs Danvers. Despite her eight decades of professional international performance as a tragedienne in stage, film, television, radio and recorded word, this major Australian cultural figure has hitherto received no comprehensive career biography.' (Introduction)
'Born in Adelaide in 1897, to a dysfunctional father and self-sacrificing mother, acting prodigy Fanny ‘Judith’ Anderson was her family's meal ticket from childhood. Her move to the USA at the age of twenty-one – with a letter of introduction to Cecil B. DeMille – might well have been disastrous, particularly as DeMille ‘rejected her as too plain’ (336). Yet this, like many setbacks, was no long-term impediment. DeMille, incidentally, cast her in The Ten Commandments thirty-eight years later.' (Introduction)
'For a long time there Dame Judith Anderson was the most famous Australian actress in the world. She wasn’t a huge film star like Errol Flynn (with whom she shared a quite discernible Australian accent) but in my childhood she was prominently featured in the supporting cast of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments, she was Big Mama to Burl Ives’s Big Daddy in the Elizabeth Taylor/Paul Newman Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and to cap everything off she gave what actor Peter Eyre described as one of the most vivid performances in the history of the world: the sinister housekeeper, Mrs Danvers, in Hitchcock’s 1940 tribute to post-Bronte-style Gothic romance, Rebecca. She was a famous Lady Macbeth and an implacable Lavinia in Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra, and she gave the most celebrated 20th-century performance in a Greek tragedy when she stormed the New York stage (and a lot of others around the world) as Euripides’ Medea. Not even Laurence Olivier’s Oedipus Rex ranks so high.' (Introduction)
'For a long time there Dame Judith Anderson was the most famous Australian actress in the world. She wasn’t a huge film star like Errol Flynn (with whom she shared a quite discernible Australian accent) but in my childhood she was prominently featured in the supporting cast of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments, she was Big Mama to Burl Ives’s Big Daddy in the Elizabeth Taylor/Paul Newman Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and to cap everything off she gave what actor Peter Eyre described as one of the most vivid performances in the history of the world: the sinister housekeeper, Mrs Danvers, in Hitchcock’s 1940 tribute to post-Bronte-style Gothic romance, Rebecca. She was a famous Lady Macbeth and an implacable Lavinia in Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra, and she gave the most celebrated 20th-century performance in a Greek tragedy when she stormed the New York stage (and a lot of others around the world) as Euripides’ Medea. Not even Laurence Olivier’s Oedipus Rex ranks so high.' (Introduction)
'Born in Adelaide in 1897, to a dysfunctional father and self-sacrificing mother, acting prodigy Fanny ‘Judith’ Anderson was her family's meal ticket from childhood. Her move to the USA at the age of twenty-one – with a letter of introduction to Cecil B. DeMille – might well have been disastrous, particularly as DeMille ‘rejected her as too plain’ (336). Yet this, like many setbacks, was no long-term impediment. DeMille, incidentally, cast her in The Ten Commandments thirty-eight years later.' (Introduction)
'Today she haunts popular iconography on multiple digital and visual platforms. In Rebecca, the definitely monochrome film of 1940 directed by Alfred Hitchcock, she is gaunt, implacable, insidious: her black frock as dark as her intentions, luring her terrified victim towards self-annihilation among flickering firelight, transparent drapes, vertiginous cliffs and turbulent waves. In the cultural memory of the twenty-first century, Judith Anderson’s complex multi-media career has almost become subsumed into her portrayal of Mrs Danvers. Despite her eight decades of professional international performance as a tragedienne in stage, film, television, radio and recorded word, this major Australian cultural figure has hitherto received no comprehensive career biography.' (Introduction)
