Jean Arthur
Jean Arthur
Arthur had feature roles in three Frank Capra films: Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) with Gary Cooper, You Can't Take It with You) (1938) co-starring James Stewart, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), also starring Stewart. These three films all championed the "everyday heroine", personified by Arthur. She also co-starred with Cary Grant in the adventure-drama Only Angels Have Wings (1939) and in the comedy-drama The Talk of the Town) (1942). She starred as the lead in the acclaimed and highly successful comedy films The Devil and Miss Jones (1941) and A Foreign Affair (1948), the latter of which she starred alongside Marlene Dietrich. Arthur was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress in 1944 for her performance in The More the Merrier (1943), a comedy which also starred Joel McCrea.
Jean Arthur
James Harvey wrote in his history of the romantic comedy: "No one was more closely identified with the screwball comedy than Jean Arthur. So much was she part of it, so much was her star personality defined by it, that the screwball style itself seems almost unimaginable without her." She has been called "the quintessential comedic leading lady". Her last film performance was non-comedic, playing the homesteader's wife in George Stevens's Shane) in 1953.
Early life
The product of a nomadic childhood, Arthur lived at times in Saranac Lake, New York; Jacksonville, Florida, and Schenectady, New York. The family lived on and off in Westbrook, Maine, from 1908 to 1915, while Arthur's father worked at Lamson Studios in Portland. Relocating in 1915 to New York City, the family settled in the Washington Heights neighborhood of upper Manhattan.
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