This week's That Gal! accomplishes something that we get to do all too infrequently in this feature: profile a character actor from the Golden Age of Hollywood that we're lucky enough to still have with us. Celeste Holm was born in New Jersey at the height of the First World War, but didn't attain fame on the motion picture screen until after the Second: the daughter of a painter and a Norwegian insurance salesman (whose sharp Nordic features were reflected in his daughter's own face) worked on Broadway for over a decade, including a long and celebrated stint as the lead in the original run of Oklahoma!, before she was signed to an exclusive contract with 20th Century Fox in 1946.
She made an immediate impact in a number of supporting roles, establishing herself as one of the few women attractive enough to carry a lead performance but strong enough as an actress to inhabit challenging character parts. The majority of her dozens of films, however, were made in the 1950s, before Holm realized that the acting she loved first was the acting she loved best: despite a star-studded and highly decorated career on the silver screen, she far preferred stage acting, and returned to it almost exclusively in the 1960s and 1970s, occasionally doing television work to pay the bills before heading back to the footlights.
The 1980s saw a mini-career renaissance for the tony, aristocratic actress, and age had diminished her acting chops not a whit: younger viewers got their first glimpse of her when she appeared in the wildly popular domestic comedy Three Men and a Baby in 1987. She hasn't made a movie in several years, but she's hardly stood idle; she's touring with a one-woman theatrical show, she's won a lawsuit against Pedro Almodovar for unauthorized use of her image, and, in grand Hollywood tradition, she's moved on to her fifth husband, an opera singer almost 50 years her junior. Now that's showbiz!
Where to see Celeste Holm at her best:
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