Saturdays with the Stars: Barbara Stanwyck

Each month of 2022 we will be taking a look at one-time film actors who became foundational figures in the early days of television, stretching from the early 1950's into the mid-1960's.  Last month we talked about Oscar-winner Donna Reed, whose association with her eponymous sitcom brought stardom, as well as decades of scorn.  This month, as we enter our final conversation about television stars, I'm going to turn the tables on you.  Throughout the year, we have profiled stars who saw massive success in television, but largely underwhelmed expectations (at least in terms of achievement) in their cinematic careers.  For December, we'll focus on an actor who saw great prosperity in television...after being one of the biggest names in movies in the previous thirty years.  This month's star is Barbara Stanwyck.

Stanwyck's childhood reads like, well, a Barbara Stanwyck movie.  Born in Brooklyn the youngest of five children, her mother died from a miscarriage when she was only four, and her father soon abandoned his family.  She grew up idolizing her older sister, who was a showgirl, and while she tried her hand at more traditional work as a typist, she eventually joined the Ziegfeld follies, and graduated to becoming a leading woman on Broadway soon after.  This allowed her to go to Hollywood, and though she struggled in her early years to find her footing, she eventually appeared in the controversial pre-Code classic Baby Face and cemented her stardom in 1937 with Stella Dallas, where she plays a mother sacrificing her teenage daughter.  She won her first of four Oscar nominations for the role, and never looked back.

Stanwyck would spend the next few decades forging a really unusual path as a star, which we're going to discuss at length this month.  Though she never won an Oscar (arguably the most important Classical Hollywood actress that the Academy ignored), she starred in classics of the era like The Lady Eve and Double Indemnity, and managed to find continual success despite not having a studio contract (really the only star of her caliber to pull off this achievement).  Stanwyck was a big enough name that by the time she signed on to do The Barbara Stanwyck Show, even if her film prospects had started to wane, it showed a changing of the tide-television was here to stay, and even the most glamorous of movie stars were willing to slum it for a chance at a big payday.  Stanwyck's self-titled series won her an Emmy though it wasn't a hit with audience, but the coming decades would be kinder, as she'd have massive success in both The Big Valley and The Thorn Birds.  This month, we're going to talk about this trailblazing star, her long film stardom, and what it meant at the end of her career when she decided to try a new path into television.