Biography
This page uses content from the Margaret Sullavan biography page on the English version of Wikipedia and is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. This list of authors can be seen in the page history. Rotten Tomatoes disclaims any and all warranties as to the accuracy or reliability of the content.
Margaret Brooke Sullavan (May 16, 1909 – January 1, 1960) was an Oscar-nominated American actress.
Sullavan was born in Norfolk, Virginia, the daughter of a wealthy stockbroker. She attended boarding school at Chatham Episcopal Institute, where she was president of the student body and delivered the salutory oration in 1927. She moved to Boston and lived with her half-sister, Weedie, and where she became involved with the Harvard Dramatic Club. She debuted in Close Up in 1929. Another member of the class was Henry Fonda. Charlie Leatherbee and Josh Logan were in the audience and invited her to join them in Falmouth, Massachusetts, to be in the University Players. She appeareed in their first production, The Devil in the Cheese, her debut in the professional stage. Eventually she was cast by Lee Shubert in her first Broadway play, A Modern Virgin (1931).
She married Henry Fonda on December 25 of that year. The marriage ended the following year, although Sullavan and Fonda remained lifelong friends. Her next marriage, to director William Wyler, was equally brief. Her third marriage, to agent and producer Leland Hayward, lasted thirteen years and produced three children: Brooke, born July 5, 1937; Bridget, born 1939; and William Leland, born 1941. Sullavan and Hayward divorced in 1947, and three years later she married Kenneth Wagg, to whom she was married at the time of her death.
She arrived in Hollywood on May 16, 1933, her 24th birthday. Sullavan's film debut came in 1933 in Only Yesterday and she received her sole Oscar nomination as Best Actress for the WWI-era romance Three Comrades (1938). She co-starred in four films with James Stewart, with whom she and Fonda had acted in a stock company when they were all unknowns: Next Time We Love (1936), The Shopworn Angel (1938), The Mortal Storm and The Shop Around the Corner (both 1940). Other major films during this period include Little Man, What Now? (1934), The Good Fairy (1935, directed by Wyler), The Shining Hour (1938, opposite Joan Crawford), So Ends Our Night, Back Street, Appointment for Love (all 1941) and Cry 'Havoc' (1943).
Her last screen performance was in the 1950 film No Sad Songs for Me She came out of retirement in 1952 to do the Broadway play, The Deep Blue Sea. She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1751 Vine Street.
Sullavan suffered from depression and a congenital hearing defect in her left ear called otosclerosis that worsened as she aged, making her more and more deaf. She was found dead in a hotel room in New Haven, Connecticut, having succumbed to a deliberate overdose of barbiturates at the age of 50, January 1, 1960.
Her daughter, actress Brooke Hayward, wrote Haywire, a memoir about her family. It was made into a television movie starring Lee Remick. Another daughter, Bridget Hayward, died 9 months after Sullavan's death from an overdose.
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