Saturday with the Stars: When TV Made the Movie Star

For the last three years, every new month we have featured a specific actress on our website, and each Saturday, we have profiled a different film from her career as part of our "Saturdays with the Stars" series. Our first season was focused on "the leading ladies of Classical Hollywood that Oscar forgot," twelve acclaimed actresses who never were nominated for Academy Awards.  The second season we focused on famous Classical Hollywood sex symbols, stretching from Jean Harlow in the pre-code 1930's all the way to Raquel Welch & Ann-Margret in the wake of the Sexual Revolution.  And in our third season, we focused on twelve women who had been leading players in the films of Alfred Hitchcock, a director with a complicated history with his leading actresses (some liking him, some loathing him), but who worked with a truly diverse group of performers in his career.

You'll notice that all three seasons of this series have been focused on the achievements of women, and that was on-purpose.  Oftentimes when retrospectives show up on websites, it's about the achievements of men.  Auteur theory makes it so that frequently film is discussed through the perspective of a director, not through an actor, and as there were virtually no female directors in Classical Hollywood, frequently their achievements get dismissed.  After three seasons, though, I think I want to do a season that focuses on both men and women, but we're going to continue our lens on Classical Hollywood, with films stretching from the late 1930's to (in some cases) well into the 1970's.

For this season, though, I want to focus on a subject that was once considered a novelty & then became the biggest threat to the movie industry of its era: television.  Television, initially thought of as a fad, a combination of radio & film, became omnipresent in American life in the 1950's, one of several contributions to the destruction of the studio system in that era, and it gave rise to a number of 1950's cinematic fads (biblical epics, SciFi, 3-D movie theaters).

TV stars, though, didn't just pop up out of nowhere.  In many cases, they were figures from the film industry whom the movies didn't want to focus on anymore.  TV offered a second chance to a number of leading actors who couldn't gain the stature of a Joan Crawford or a Clark Gable, and therefore this was a second act that would offer a new chance for a large number of performers.  This season, we will focus on twelve actors who cemented their legacy in television throughout the 1950's & into the mid-1960's (again, roughly in line with the end of Classical Hollywood).  In some cases, these were actors who had enjoyed great success in film but could no longer find work...in others, these were stars who had gotten a smattering of success in film, but radio & television offered them a way to cater a show around their talents, and thus made them true household names.  With one big exception, none of these actors are instantly thought of as a film star today (and we'll save the one who showed that television had truly taken over the film colony in a way that they'd never be able to get back from way at the end of the year), so I think it'll be fascinating to look at what they were doing before they went into television, as well as to discuss what television did to how we think about them today.  I hope you'll join us as we embark on our fourth season of Saturdays with the Stars.