The Best Years of Our Lives

The Best Years of Our Lives is a moving, poignant drama about three servicemen trying to piece their lives back together after coming back home from World War II.Samuel Goldwyn was motivated to produce the film after his wife Frances read an August 7, 1944 article in Time magazine which told about the homecoming story of war veterans and their difficulty. Goldwyn hired MacKinlay Kantor to write the story, which was first published as a book, Glory for Me. Robert Sherwood then wrote the screenplay. It was directed by William Wyler, with cinematography by Gregg Toland.

The ensemble cast includes Fredric March, Myrna Loy, Dana Andrews, Teresa Wright, Virginia Mayo, and Hoagy Carmichael. It also features Harold Russell, an actor who had lost both his hands in a training accident.  The film revolves around the three men, their families and how they cope after coming back to America after serving their country during WWII.  One of the most moving performances was that of Harold Russell, a non professional actor, and amputee.

The film received seven Academy Awards. Despite his touching Oscar-nominated performance, Harold Russell was not a professional actor and the Board of Governors considered him a long shot to win, so he was given an honorary award “for bringing hope and courage to his fellow veterans through his appearance”. However, he was named Best Supporting Actor to a tumultuous reception, making him the only actor to receive two Academy Awards for the same performance.

Harold Russell ~ Two Awards, One Night

Born in North Sydney, Nova Scotia, Canada; raised in Boston, MA. A paratroop sergeant in WWII, he lost both hands in a hand-grenade explosion. He appeared in an Army documentary, THE DIARY OF A SERGEANT, depicting the rehabilitation of an amputee. Later he was chosen by William Wyler to play a key role in THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES (1946) and won the 1946 best supporting actor Academy Award for his natural performance as an amputee struggling to adjust to civilian life, as well as a second, special Academy Award “for bringing hope and courage to his fellow veterans.” He is the only actor ever to win two Oscars for the same role. He was one of only two non-professional actors to win an Academy Award for acting. In 1949 he published his autobiography, Victory in My Hands. Later a business executive, in 1964 he was appointed by President Johnson as chairman of the President’s Committee on Hiring the Handicapped.

In 1992, Russell needed money for his wife’s medical expenses. In a controversial decision, he sold his Oscar to a private collector for $60,500. Russell defended his action, saying: “I don’t know why anybody would be critical. My wife’s health is much more important than sentimental reasons. The movie will be here, even if Oscar isn’t.” The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has required all Oscar recipients since 1950 to sign an agreement forbidding them from selling their award.

Anne Baxter ~ Razor’s Edge

Anne Baxter was born May 7, 1923, in Michigan City, Indiana to Kenneth Stuart Baxter and Catherine Wright; her maternal grandfather was the world famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Baxter’s father was a prominent executive with the Seagrams Distillery Co. and she was raised in New York City amidst luxury and sophistication. At age ten, Baxter attended a Broadway play starring Helen Hayes, and was so impressed that she declared to her family that she wanted to become an actress. By the age of thirteen, Anne had proved her dream and appeared on Broadway.

Her first movie role was in 20 Mule Team in 1940. She was chosen by Orson Welles to appear in The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), based on the novel by Booth Tarkington. Baxter co-starred with Tyrone Power and Gene Tierney in 1946’s The Razor’s Edge, and walked away with the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.

Today, Baxter is remembered for her compelling role as the Egyptian princess Nefertiri opposite Charlton Heston’s portrayal of Moses in Cecil B. Demille’s award winning The Ten Commandments (1956).

Baxter died from a brain aneurysm on December 12, 1985, while walking down Madison Avenue in New York City. She is buried on the estate of Frank Lloyd Wright in Spring Green, Wisconsin.

Olivia de Havilland ~ Always Melanie

Born to British parents in Tokyo, Japan, raised in California and discovered by Max Reinhardt. De Havilland was often cast as the forgiving, passive woman opposite swashbuckling men like Errol Flynn, first proving her serious dramatic ability as the long-suffering Melanie in GONE WITH THE WIND (1939). In a celebrated court case of the 1940s she successfully sued Warner Bros. for refusing to release her at the end of a seven-year contract. (Warners had suspended her for six months for demanding better roles and claimed that she had to make up the extra time at the end of the seven-year period.) De Havilland’s victory marked a breakthrough in players’ rights, with studio contracts subsequently being limited to a total of seven years. 1946 gave her the first of two Oscars for her role in To Each His Own.Even though it seems that Miss De Havilland has been around forever, she lists only 47 feature films on her credits. Considering that 15 of them came before her first Oscar nomination, she has a remarkable record of fine screen performances. Some of her notable non-nominated credits include ALIBI IKE, A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM and CAPTAIN BLOOD (all 1935), ANTHONY ADVERSE and THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE (both 1936), THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD (1938), DODGE CITY and THE PRIVATE LIVES OF ELIZABETH AND ESSEX (both 1939), RAFFLES and SANTA FE TRAIL (both 1940), THEY DIED WITH THEIR BOOTS ON and THE STRAWBERRY BLONDE (both 1941), IN THIS OUR LIFE and THE MALE ANIMAL (both 1942), PRINCESS O’ROURKE (1943), DEVOTION and THE DARK MIRROR (both 1946), MY COUSIN RACHEL (1952), NOT AS A STRANGER (1955), THE PROUD REBEL (1958), LIBEL (1959), LIGHT IN THE PIAZZA (1962), LADY IN A CAGE and HUSH… HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE (both 1964), THE ADVENTURERS (1970), POPE JOAN (1972), AIRPORT ‘77 (1977), THE SWARM (1978) and THE FIFTH MUSKETEER (1979).

Frederic March ~ The Best Father

Born Ernest Frederick McIntyre Bickel, Fredric March was a two-time Academy Award-winning American actor. Born in Racine, Wisconsin, he attended the Winslow Elementary School (established in 1855), Racine High School, and the University of Wisconsin where he was a member of Alpha Delta Phi. He began a career as a banker, but an emergency appendectomy caused him to reevaluate his life, and in 1920 he began working as an extra in movies made in New York City, using a shortened form of his mother’s maiden name, Marcher. He appeared on Broadway in 1926, and by the end of the decade signed a film contract with Paramount Pictures.

March won an Oscar nomination in 1930 for The Royal Family of Broadway, in which he played a role based upon John Barrymore. He tied for the Oscar for Best Actor in 1932 for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and again in 1946 for The Best Years of Our Lives. In 1954, March hosted the 26th Annual Academy Awards.March was one of the few actors to resist signing long-term contracts with the studios, and was able to freelance and pick and choose his roles, in the process also avoiding typecasting. By this time, he was working on Broadway as often as in Hollywood, and his screen career was not as prolific as it had been.

March, however, won two Best Actor Tony Awards: in 1947 for the play Years Ago, written by Ruth Gordon; and in 1957 for a Broadway production of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night. A friend of playwright Arthur Miller, he was favored by the writer to inaugurate the part of Willy Loman in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Death of a Salesman (1949). Director Elia Kazan cast Lee J. Cobb, however, as Willy Loman, and Arthur Kennedy as his son Biff Loman, two men that the director had worked with in the film Boomerang! (1947). March later played Willy Loman in Columbia Pictures’s 1951 film version of the play, directed by Laslo Benedek. Perhaps March’s greatest late-in-life role was in Inherit the Wind (1960), opposite Spencer Tracy.

When March underwent surgery for prostate cancer in 1972, it seemed his career was over, yet he managed to give one last great performance in The Iceman Cometh (1973), as the complicated Irish bartender, Harry Hope. Ironically, co-star Robert Ryan was entering the final stages of lung cancer, so the film was the last for both March and Ryan.

Fredric March died in Los Angeles, California, at the age of 77 from cancer. He was married to actress Florence Eldridge from 1927 until his death; they had 2 adopted children.

Throughout his life, he and his wife were supporters of the Democratic Party and liberal political causes. His support for the Republican (Second Spanish Republic) side during the Spanish Civil War was particularly controversial.

Lost Weekend ~ Winning Picture

“I’m not a drinker — I’m a drunk.” These words, and the serious message behind them, were still potent enough in 1945 to shock audiences flocking to The Lost Weekend. The speaker is Don Birnam (Ray Milland), a handsome, talented, articulate alcoholic. The writing team of producer Charles Brackett and director Billy Wilder pull no punches in their depiction of Birnam’s massive weekend bender, a tailspin that finds him reeling from his favorite watering hole to Bellevue Hospital. Location shooting in New York helps the street-level atmosphere, especially a sequence in which Birnam, a budding writer, tries to hock his typewriter for booze money. He desperately staggers past shuttered storefronts — it’s Yom Kippur, and the pawnshops are closed. Milland, previously known as a lightweight leading man, burrows convincingly under the skin of the character, whether waxing poetic about the escape of drinking or screaming his lungs out in the d.t.’s sequence.

Wilder, having just made the ultra-noir Double Indemnity (1944), brought a new kind of frankness and darkness to Hollywood’s treatment of a social problem. At first the film may have seemed too bold; Paramount Pictures nearly killed the release of the picture after it tested poorly with preview audiences. But once in release, The Lost Weekend became a substantial hit, and won four Oscars