Teresa Wright

There are many reasons to love Teresa Wright. Her natural beauty. Her understated acting. Her acclaimed dramas for legendary directors like William Wyler and Alfred Hitchcock.

But Wright’s way-before-its-time addendum to her first movie contract is perhaps the greatest reason of all. She refused to play by show biz rules, claiming producers “trade us like cattle, boss us like children.” So Wright set the terms for her surrender with a list of things she refused to do:

“...Teresa Wright shall not be required to pose for photographs in a bathing suit unless she is in the water...[or] photographed running on the beach with her hair flying in the wind. Nor may she pose...in shorts, playing with a cocker spaniel; digging in a garden; whipping up a meal...looking insinuatingly at a turkey for Thanksgiving; wearing a bunny cap with long ears for Easter; twinkling on prop snow in a skiing outfit while a fan blows her scarf; assuming an athletic stance while pretending to hit something with a bow and arrow.”

Cheesecake shots? Nope. Interviews with fan magazines? Rare. It’s surprising that a woman so allergic to the studio system succeeded in Hollywood. Yet as Teresa Wright once put it, “I never wanted to be a star. I wanted only to be an actress.”

Let stars do sexy photo spreads and schmooze gossip columnists. Serious actresses focus on the job, not the fame game. Or as Wright explained, "I would have to make good on my acting ability, which was the only attribute I could offer."

Muriel Teresa Wright was born on October 27, 1918, between two global catastrophes (World War I and the Spanish Flu epidemic that killed 50 million people). Her father was a traveling insurance agent. According to Wright’s biographer Donald Spoto, her mother was a prostitute who sometimes serviced clients in the same bed she shared with her young daughter. With mostly absent parents, Wright “floated among relatives.”

After acting in high school productions, Wright parlayed summer stock apprenticeships into her first Broadway gig in 1938, as an understudy to Dorothy McGuire and Martha Scott in Our Town. Wright’s next hit play was Life With Father, which is where producer Samuel Goldwyn discovered Wright and promptly signed her to a five-year contract.

By 1941, Wright’s future seemed sprinkled with stardust. Her first film (The Little Foxes,

opposite Bette Davis) scored Wright’s first Oscar nomination.

Her second picture (Mrs. Miniver) won Wright an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress, the same year she was nominated as Best Actress for The Pride of the Yankees, playing Gary Cooper’s wife.

Wright also was tapped by Alfred Hitchcock for the lead in the film Hitch called his favorite, Shadow of a Doubt (1943).

In 1946, Wright co-starred in William Wyler's masterpiece The Best Years of Our Lives. Critic James Agee lavishly praised Wright, saying her performance “entirely lacking in big scenes, tricks or obstreperousness – one can hardly think of it as acting – seems to me one of the wisest and most beautiful pieces of work I have seen in years. If the picture had none of the hundreds of other things it has to recommend it, I could watch it a dozen times over for that personality and its mastery alone.”

Although Wright’s prospects waned after Sam Goldwyn cancelled her contract in 1948, she appeared in 1950s releases with Spencer Tracy (The Actress), Marlon Brando (The Men), and on stage and television. Off-screen, Wright married screenwriter Niven Busch in 1942. They had a son and daughter before divorcing in 1952. She also twice married and divorced playwright Robert Anderson (Tea & Sympathy), with a brief marriage to actor Carlos Pierre in between.

In 1997, Wright played her final role: Matt Damon’s landlady in The Rainmaker.

But one of my favorite stories about Wright happened after her death in 2005. That year, when the New York Yankees did their annual roll call of players who had died, Wright’s name was among them – a tribute to her moving portrayal of Mrs. Lou Gehrig in The Pride of the Yankees, and her passionate love for the team.