OSCAR’S CANADIAN GIRLS



 America's Sweetheart. Toronto native Mary Pickford

Back in the day, as the Great Depression descended on the world, when the Academy awards were brand new and Canadian hockey supremacy was unchallenged, there was another very different kind of Team Canada building a minor dynasty.

After Janet Gaynor won the very first Best Actress Oscar in 1929,for her portrayal of a prostitute in Street Angel, Canadian women monopolized the award for the next three years. Unless you know something I don’t, none have won ever since though one did come close decades later.

They are three fascinating stories and I shouldn’t be burning them all in one post it is a little known tribute to the stature and influence Canadians had in the early days of Hollywood film and myth.

From 1930-32, Canadian women had a lock on the Best Actress statuette.

First there was Mary Pickford, aka America’s Sweetheart, arguably the biggest movie star of all time. Her fame and power at the time can’t be overstated. She was a poor young girl from Toronto who made a career of playing poor young girls in the silent movie era. Born Gladys Smith in 1892, she made her stage debut at the age of six and went on to make over 230 movies, be a founding partner of United Artists studio (with Charlie Chaplin) and a founding member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Sadly, her superstardom was abruptly ended with the invention of sound. The poor-young-girl well ran dry wit the advent of sound

She did win Best Actress in 1930 for her first speaking role in Coquette.

But either the Academy could see the writing on the wall for her or she twisted many arms to get enough votes. To put it kindly, it is often regarded as the first Lifetime Achievement Award because it was a truly dreadful movie. Pushing 40, her attempt to reprise her winning formula of portraying plucky young girls failed miserably. Still, the award can be seen as a tribute to the box-office force she had been for a decade. A major achievement for a Canadian artist.

Next was one of Hollywood’s original glamour queens. Norma Shearer was an ambitious Montreal girl who, unlike Pickford mastered the transition to sound and went on to receive five Best Actress nominations. There is to this day a Shearer Street in a legendary working-class part of her home town. It was named after the lane in which her grandfather had a lumber yard.

She overcame the potentially fatal flaw for a femme fatale of a cast in one eye. OK she was cross-eyed and cured it with the help of a hideously expensive and renowned New York doctor. But you can still see it in some scenes in her later films if you know what you’re looking for.

She won for performance in The Divorcee, itself a fascinating movie from what is known as the Pre-Code days.

The Hollywood brand was so threatened by a series of scandals involving sex, drugs, alcohol and other deadly sins Hollywood studios banded together under former Postmaster General Will Hays to come up with a list of 36 cinematic no-no’s. “The Code sets high standards for motion-picture producers…the sympathy of the audience shall never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin.”

From 1934 on threats to moral standards such as “lustful kissing” “suggestive dancing” or God forbid interracial romance were banished from mainstream movies.

It was a desperate attempt to avoid full-fledged government censorship. It was so intensely self-inflicted that decades later married couples on TV, the Cleavers, Ozzie and Harriet, still slept in separate beds. It was partly why Spencer Tracy was so gob smacked by the prospect of having Sidney Poitier as a son-in-law in 1967’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.” 

In 1930 there was no such code in effect. Women were allowed to be promiscuous, like Barbara Stanwyck in Baby Face. Or to have extramarital affairs like Shearer’s character in The Divorcee.

Before you dial up that porn site to see Garbo naked or something, it was all somewhat less than hard core.

The infidelity of Shearer’s character Jerry is conveyed by the window of the house she’s been visiting a man not her bonehead husband, goes dark without her seen leaving.

It might have been seen as cutting-edge or risqué or courageous, ground breaking social commentary because otherwise it doesn’t stand out as one of the great performances of all time.

But it did give Shearer the singular achievement besting not only the great Garbo, but herself for another film the same year, Their Own Desire. Talk about a good year. You might enjoy her best in The Women, a minor classic with the crackling dialogue of a cat-eat-cat world. “There is a word for those women but it’s not supposed to be used outside a kennel.”

Which leaves the best story for last.

The bittersweet tale of Marie Dressler, the Best Actress Winner of the Fourth Academy Awards for her performance in Min and Bill.

Min runs a dockside dive of a hotel and has a soft spot for a hard-drinking fisherman played by Wallace Beery. She is homely as only Dressler could be, beset by troubles which are of course defeated by her good intentions and heart of gold.

The description of her as homely is her own. She did entitle her autobiography “The Memoirs of an Ugly Duckling.” Her life is one of those rags to riches to rags to riches stories.

She was born just a year after Canada’s Confederation in the bucolic Ontario town of Cobourg, which even now has a population of about 20,000. She went from a stage career to become a silent movie star. But she fell out of fashion into destitution. She was blacklisted by the little dictators that ran the entertainment business when she supported a chorus girl strike on Broadway.

Ironically but not uncoincidentally, her career rebounded and soared just as the Great Depression wreaked its devastation.

Tragically, at the peak of her considerable fame, she had only a few years left to bask in the glow.

She was the exact antithesis of her fellow expat superstar Norma Shearer. The anti- Glam Queen. The everyman to whom the afflicted could relate. And there were more and more of the afflicted as the economy disintegrated.

Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt were among her biggest fans. And as unlikely as it might seem that you got this far without knowing stuff like this Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the 32^nd President of the United States also with many fans among the afflicted.

She beat Marlene Dietrich and Shearer for that  Oscar.But she would lose her battle with cancer just three short years later.

She received no nominations for her role of Carlotta in Dinner at Eight. But it is a great movie and probably her best performance. Or at least a nice way to remember here.

That makes it an 80-year winless streak for Canadian women at the Oscars. Only a stunningly precocious performance by Geneviève Bujold opposite Richard Burton in Anne of a Thousand Days , came close. She did win the Golden Globe in 1968 but lost the Oscar to the sublime Maggie Smith for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

Maybe it was just a historical accident, but the little streak does show the profound influence Canadians had on the emerging art form and entertainment industry. Is there another streak coming together? And what about the track record of Canadian men? Those would be other posts. I’m not going to blow them all now.