58 Facts About Margaret Sullavan

Margaret Brooke Sullavan was an American stage and film actress.

Margaret Sullavan continued to be successful on stage and film, best known for The Shop Around the Corner.

Margaret Sullavan preferred working on the stage and only made 16 films, four of which were opposite close friend James Stewart in a popular partnership that included The Mortal Storm and The Shop Around the Corner.

Stewart and Margaret Sullavan were close friends of Henry Fonda, to whom Margaret Sullavan was married from 1931 to 1933.

Margaret Sullavan was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in Three Comrades.

Margaret Sullavan retired from the screen in the early 1940s to devote herself to her children and stage work.

Margaret Sullavan returned to the screen in 1950 to make her last film, No Sad Songs for Me, in which she played a woman dying of cancer.

Margaret Sullavan, who experienced deafness and depression during the 1950s, died on January 1,1960, at the age of 50.

Margaret Sullavan had a younger brother, Cornelius, and a half-sister, Louise Gregory.

Margaret Sullavan attended boarding school at Chatham Episcopal Institute, where she was president of the student body and delivered the salutatory oration in 1927.

Margaret Sullavan moved to Boston and lived with her half-sister, Weedie, while she studied dance at the Boston Denishawn studio and drama at the Copley Theatre.

When her parents cut her allowance to a minimum, Margaret Sullavan defiantly paid her way by working as a clerk in the Harvard Cooperative Bookstore, located in Harvard Square, Cambridge.

Margaret Sullavan succeeded in getting a chorus part in the Harvard Dramatic Society 1929 spring production Close Up, a musical written by Harvard senior Bernard Hanighen, who was later a composer for Broadway and Hollywood.

The President of the Harvard Dramatic Society, Charles Leatherbee, along with the President of Princeton's Theatre Intime, Bretaigne Windust, who together had established the University Players on Cape Cod the summer before, persuaded Margaret Sullavan to join them for their second summer season.

Margaret Sullavan returned for most of the University Players' 1930 season.

Margaret Sullavan's parents did not approve of her choice of career.

Margaret Sullavan played the lead in Strictly Dishonorable by Preston Sturges, which her parents attended.

At the time, Margaret Sullavan was suffering from a bad case of laryngitis and her voice was huskier than usual.

Margaret Sullavan made her debut on Broadway in A Modern Virgin on May 20,1931, and began touring on August 3.

In March 1933, Margaret Sullavan replaced another actor in Dinner at Eight in New York.

Margaret Sullavan decided she would be perfect for a picture he was planning, Only Yesterday.

At that time Margaret Sullavan had already turned down offers for five-year contracts from Paramount and Columbia.

Margaret Sullavan was offered a three-year, two-pictures-per-year contract at $1,200 per week.

Margaret Sullavan accepted it and had a clause put in her contract that allowed her to return to the stage on occasion.

Later in her career, Margaret Sullavan signed only short-term contracts because she did not want to be "owned" by any studio.

Margaret Sullavan arrived in Hollywood on May 16,1933, her 24th birthday.

King Vidor's So Red the Rose dealt with people in the postbellum South and preceded the publication of Margaret Sullavan Mitchell's bestselling novel Gone With the Wind by one year and the blockbuster film adaptation by four years.

Margaret Sullavan played a childish Southern belle who matures into a responsible woman.

In Next Time We Love, Margaret Sullavan played opposite the then-unknown James Stewart.

Margaret Sullavan had been campaigning for Stewart to be her leading man, and the studio complied for fear that she would stage a threatened strike.

Margaret Sullavan gained an Oscar nomination for her role and was named the year's best actress by the New York Film Critics Circle.

In 1940, Margaret Sullavan appeared in The Mortal Storm, a film about the lives of common Germans during the rise of Adolf Hitler.

Margaret Sullavan's co-starring roles with James Stewart are among the highlights of their early careers.

In 1935, Margaret Sullavan had decided on doing Next Time We Love.

Years earlier, during a casual conversation with some fellow actors on Broadway, Margaret Sullavan predicted that Stewart would become a major Hollywood star.

Margaret Sullavan was borrowed from MGM to star with Sullavan in Next Time We Love.

However, Margaret Sullavan believed in Stewart and spent evenings coaching him and helping him scale down his awkward mannerisms and hesitant speech that were soon to be famous.

When Margaret Sullavan divorced Wyler in 1936 and married Leland Hayward that same year, they moved into a colonial house just a block away from that of Stewart.

Margaret Sullavan came absolutely alive in his scenes with her, playing with a conviction and a sincerity I never knew him to summon away from her.

Margaret Sullavan took a break from films from 1943 to 1950.

Margaret Sullavan felt that only on the stage could she improve her skills as an actor.

Margaret Sullavan felt that she had been neglecting them and felt guilty about it.

Margaret Sullavan returned to the screen in 1950 to do one last picture, No Sad Songs for Me.

Margaret Sullavan played a suburban housewife and mother who learns that she will die of cancer within a year and who then determines to find a "second" wife for her soon-to-be-widower husband.

Margaret Sullavan played the part of Jessica who writes under the pen name Janus, and Robert Preston played her husband.

Margaret Sullavan had mixed emotions about a return to acting, and her depression soon became clear to everyone: "I loathe acting", she said on the day she started rehearsals.

Margaret Sullavan had a reputation for being both temperamental and straightforward.

Margaret Sullavan rose from her seat and doused Fonda from head to foot with a pitcher of ice water.

Fonda made a stately exit, and Margaret Sullavan, composed and unconcerned, returned to her table and ate heartily.

Margaret Sullavan had admitted he was in love with Hayward, but they never had a relationship.

At the time of the marriage on November 15,1936, Margaret Sullavan was pregnant with the couple's first child.

In 1947, Margaret Sullavan filed for divorce after discovering that Hayward was having an affair with socialite Slim Keith.

In 1950, Margaret Sullavan married for a fourth and final time, to English investment banker Kenneth Wagg.

Margaret Sullavan remained adamant, and his mother had started to cry.

Margaret Sullavan suffered from the congenital hearing defect otosclerosis that worsened as she aged, making her more and more hearing-impaired.

Margaret Sullavan's voice had developed a throatiness because she could hear low tones better than high ones.

From early 1957, Margaret Sullavan's hearing declined so much that she was becoming depressed and sleepless and often wandered about all night.

Margaret Sullavan was inducted, posthumously, into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1981.