page_title: Jean Arthur
section_title: Broadway and Columbia Pictures
hierarchical_section_title: Jean Arthur / Career / Broadway and Columbia Pictures
caption_attribution_description: English: publicity photo of Jean Arthur for film The Talk Of The Town.
context_page_description: Jean Arthur was an American Broadway and film actress whose career began in silent films in the 1920s and lasted until the early 1950s.
  Arthur had feature roles in three Frank Capra films: Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, You Can't Take It with You, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, films that championed the "everyday heroine". Arthur was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress in 1944 for her performance in The More the Merrier.
  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.
  Arthur was known as a reclusive woman. News magazine Life observed in a 1940 article: "Next to Garbo, Jean Arthur is Hollywood's reigning mystery woman." As well as recoiling from interviews, she avoided photographers and refused to become a part of any kind of publicity.
context_section_description: In late 1931, Arthur returned to New York City, where a Broadway agent cast Arthur in an adaptation of Lysistrata, which opened at the Riviera Theater on January 24, 1932. A few months later, she made her Broadway debut in Foreign Affairs opposite Dorothy Gish and Osgood Perkins. Even though the play did not fare well and closed after twenty-three performances, critics were impressed by her work on stage. She next won the female lead in The Man Who Reclaimed His Head, which opened on September 8, 1932, at the Broadhurst Theatre to mostly mixed notices for Arthur, and negative reviews for the play caused the production to be halted quickly. Arthur returned to California for the holidays, and appeared in the RKO film The Past of Mary Holmes (1933), her first film in two years.
  Back on Broadway, Arthur continued to appear in small plays that received little attention. Critics, however, continued to praise her in their reviews. It has been argued that in this period, Arthur developed confidence in her acting craft for the first time. On the contrast between films in Hollywood and plays in New York, Arthur commented:
  I don't think Hollywood is the place to be yourself. The individual ought to find herself before coming to Hollywood. On the stage I found myself to be in a different world. The individual counted. The director encouraged me and I learned how to be myself.... I learned to face audiences and to forget them. To see the footlights and not to see them; to gauge the reactions of hundreds of people, and yet to throw myself so completely into a role that I was oblivious to their reaction.
  The Curtain Rises, which ran from October to December 1933, was Arthur's first Broadway play in which she was the center of attention. With an improved résumé, she returned to Hollywood in late 1933, and turned down several contract offers until she was asked to meet with an executive from Columbia Pictures. Arthur agreed to star in a film, Whirlpool (1934), and during production she was offered a long-term contract that promised financial stability for both her and her parents. Even though hesitant to give up her stage career, Arthur signed the five-year contract on February 14, 1934.
  In 1935, at age 34, Arthur starred opposite Edward G. Robinson in the gangster farce The Whole Town's Talking, also directed by Ford, and her popularity began to rise. It was the first time Arthur portrayed a hard-boiled working girl with a heart of gold, the type of role she would be associated with for the rest of her career. She enjoyed the acting experience and working opposite Robinson, who remarked in his biography that it was a "delight to work with and know" Arthur. By the time of the film's release, her hair, naturally brunette throughout the silent film portion of her career, was bleached blonde and would mostly stay that way. She was known for maneuvering to be photographed and filmed almost exclusively from the left; Arthur felt that her left was her best side, and worked hard to keep it in the fore. Director Frank Capra recalled producer Harry Cohn's description of Jean Arthur's imbalanced profile: "half of it's angel, and the other half horse." Her next few films, Party Wire (1935), Public Hero No. 1 (1935) and If You Could Only Cook (1935), did not match the success of The Whole Town's Talking, but they all brought the actress positive reviews. In his review for The New York Times, critic Andre Sennwald praised Arthur's performance in Public Hero No. 1, writing that she "is as refreshing a change from the routine it-girl as Joseph Calleia is in his own department." Another critic wrote of her performance in If You Could Only Cook that "[she is] outstanding as she effortlessly slips from charming comedienne to beautiful romantic." With her now apparent rise to fame, Arthur was able to extract several contractual concessions from Harry Cohn, such as script and director approval and the right to make films for other studios.
  The turning point in Arthur's career came when she was chosen by Frank Capra to star in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. Capra h
caption: In The Talk of the Town (1942)
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