page_title: Eve Arden
section_title: Radio and television
hierarchical_section_title: Eve Arden / Career / Radio and television
caption_attribution_description: English: Groucho Marx and Eve Arden in At the Circus (1939) - trailer (cropped screenshot)
context_page_description: Eve Arden was an American film, radio, stage, and television actress, and comedian. She performed in leading and supporting roles for nearly six decades.
  Beginning her film career in 1929 and on Broadway in the early 1930s, Arden's first major role was in the RKO Radio Pictures drama Stage Door opposite Katharine Hepburn, followed by roles in the comedies Having Wonderful Time and the Marx Brothers' At the Circus. She received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her role in Mildred Pierce.
  Later in her career, Arden played the sardonic but engaging high school teacher in the eponymous Our Miss Brooks, for which she won the first Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series. She also played the school principal in the musicals Grease and Grease 2.
context_section_description: Arden's ability with witty scripts made her a natural talent for radio. She was a regular on Danny Kaye's short-lived but memorably zany comedy-variety show in 1946, which also featured swing bandleader Harry James and gravel-voiced character actor-comedian Lionel Stander.
  Kaye's show lasted one season, but Arden's comic talent led to her best-known role, that of Madison High School English teacher Connie Brooks in Our Miss Brooks. Arden portrayed the character on radio from 1948 to 1957, in a television version of the program from 1952 to 1956, and in a 1956 feature film. Her character clashed with the school's principal, Osgood Conklin (played by Gale Gordon) and nursed an unrequited crush on fellow teacher Philip Boynton (played originally by future film star Jeff Chandler; and later on radio and TV by Robert Rockwell). Except for Chandler, the entire radio cast of Arden, Gordon, Richard Crenna (Walter Denton), Robert Rockwell (Mr. Philip Boynton), Gloria McMillan (Harriet Conklin) and Jane Morgan (landlady Margaret Davis) played the same roles on TV.
  Arden's portrayal of Miss Brooks was so popular that she was made an honorary member of the National Education Association, received a 1952 award from the Teachers College of Connecticut's Alumni Association "for humanizing the American teacher", and even received teaching job offers. Her wisecracking, deadpan character ultimately became her public persona as a comedienne.
  She won a listeners' poll by Radio Mirror magazine as the top-ranking comedienne of 1948–1949, receiving her award at the end of an Our Miss Brooks broadcast that March. "I'm certainly going to try in the coming months to merit the honor you've bestowed upon me, because I understand that if I win this (award) two years in a row, I get to keep Mr. Boynton," she joked. She was also a hit with the critics: A winter 1949 poll of newspaper and magazine radio editors by Motion Picture Daily named her the year's best radio comedienne.
  Arden had a very brief guest appearance in a 1955 I Love Lucy episode titled "L.A. at Last", where she played herself. While awaiting their food at the Brown Derby, Lucy Ricardo (Lucille Ball) and Ethel Mertz (Vivian Vance) argue over whether a certain portrait on a nearby wall is Shelley Winters or Judy Holliday. Lucy urges Ethel to ask a lady occupying the next booth, who turns and replies, "Neither. That's Eve Arden." As Ethel realizes she just spoke to Arden herself, Arden passes Lucy and Ethel's table to leave the restaurant while the pair gawk.
  Desilu Productions, jointly owned by Desi Arnaz and Ball during their marriage, was the production company for the Our Miss Brooks television show, filmed during the same years as I Love Lucy. Ball and Arden met when they costarred in the film Stage Door in 1937. Ball, according to numerous radio historians, suggested Arden for Our Miss Brooks after Shirley Booth auditioned for but failed to land the role and Ball—committed at the time to My Favorite Husband—could not.
  Arden tried another series in the fall of 1957, The Eve Arden Show, but it was canceled in spring of 1958 after 26 episodes. In 1966, she played Nurse Kelton in an episode of Bewitched. She later costarred with Kaye Ballard as her neighbor and in-law, Eve Hubbard, in the 1967–1969 situation comedy The Mothers-in-Law, produced by Arnaz after the dissolution of Desilu Productions. In her later career, Arden made appearances on such television shows as Bewitched, Alice, Maude, Hart to Hart, and Falcon Crest. In 1985, she appeared as the wicked stepmother in the Faerie Tale Theatre production of Cinderella.
caption: Groucho Marx and Eve Arden in a scene from At the Circus (1939)
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