Saturdays with the Stars: Ann Sheridan

As I mentioned a little over a week ago, I will be doing a new series in 2019 called "Saturdays with the Stars" where I will be profiling the careers of 12 major headlining actresses from Classical Hollywood who were never nominated for an Academy Award.  I outline the reasons for this in the article linked above, but basically since we do an Oscar Viewing Project here, that is entirely focused on Oscar-nominated performances and films, if I was going to add a second filmic project to my dossier, I wanted it to focus on a different aspect of film history, hence these twelve women.  Today, we announce the first of these twelve women, an actress who kind of epitomizes this year's theme, Ann Sheridan.

Sheridan is an actress whose work I am only briefly familiar with-I have, to my knowledge, only seen one of her movies, The Opposite Sex, where the once major headlining performer had to take fourth-billing behind then brand-new star Joan Collins & stage icon (but hardly a cinematic one) Dolores Gray.  I know very little of Sheridan during her heyday, roughly from the late 1930's to the early 1950's, when she was sharing above-the-title credits with the likes of James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, and her most frequent costar, Ronald Reagan.

Sheridan is not well-remembered today, but that almost wasn't the case.  The thing I did know about Sheridan as an actress before choosing her to kick off this article is how close she came to immortality, which makes her a perfect fit for this series, since she was considered for three different iconic roles in movie history: Scarlett O'Hara, Ilsa Lund, and Mildred Pierce.  Her involvement with Casablanca is the stuff of legend now, though it's not entirely clear how serious the studio was about casting her as Ilsa Lund, opposite of Ronald Reagan.  While it's indisputable that Warner Brothers at one point put out a press release announcing Reagan and Sheridan would star in the all-time Hollywood classic, most film historians consider Humphrey Bogart, at least, to have been the only serious male lead for the film, and if it wasn't going to be Reagan, it was probably going to be George Raft.  Similarly, while Sheridan seems to to have been more seriously considered, she wasn't the only one who was an option before the studio finally decided on Ingrid Bergman; Hedy Lamarr and French actress Michele Morgan were both considered for the role as well.  Sheridan's involvement with Gone with the Wind feels tangential (virtually every actress of that era was thought to be a potential Scarlett, with even Lucille Ball auditioning for the part if you can believe it), though it does appear Mildred Pierce was a real option, enough so that it looks like Sheridan (along with Bette Davis and Barbara Stanwyck, director Michael Curtiz's choice) turned down the role that eventually won Joan Crawford an Oscar & a massive comeback in her career.

So Sheridan as a star is best-remembered as an also-ran, someone who could have been an immortal like Leigh or Crawford or Bergman, but instead is simply someone who was very famous for a while.  This month, we'll be exploring the actress's career that actually happened, the roles she did take.  We'll be starting with our first film this Saturday, but in the meantime, if you have a favorite Sheridan performance that you'd like to recommend (or are hoping I cover here), please share in the comments below!