Saturdays with the Stars: Virginia Mayo

Each month of 2019 we will be looking at the careers of the leading ladies of Classical Hollywood who were never nominated for an Academy Award as part of our "Saturdays with the Stars" series.  Last month, we focused on Ann Sheridan, a major star for Warner Brothers during the early 1940's.  This February, we'll continue on with another major contract player from Warner Brothers who emerged just a few years after Sheridan and became one of their biggest attractions of the late 1940's: Virginia Mayo.

While Sheridan spent years at Paramount in nothing parts before eventually striking it big at Warner doing B-movies, Mayo cut her chops doing vaudeville (performing in a horse costume in one of the few bawdy roles of her rather G-rated career).  After a brief stint on Broadway, she tried to break into the movies, but was turned down by David O. Selznick; however, Samuel Goldwyn still signed her to a contract and she got her first major role in 1943's Jack London, and was a headliner just a year later opposite Bob Hope in The Princess and the Pirate.  Mayo would remain a major star for roughly 15 years, though her career never properly recovered after making The Silver Chalice (a major flop) with a young Paul Newman in 1954.

Mayo stands apart from Sheridan in two ways for me, one personal and one universal.  While I had only seen one of Sheridan's films before, I have by my count seen at least three of Mayo's film (a reminder if you couldn't recall-the goal of this year's stars is for me to pick performers where I'm unfamiliar with the vast majority of their filmographies).  What's more, other than The Flame and the Arrow (the first movie I've ever enjoyed Burt Lancaster in), the other two are genuine classics that are well-remembered today: 1946's The Best Years of Our Lives and 1949's White Heat (by comparison, Sheridan has celebrated films but nothing in the same league as either of these two pictures).  Mayo is very good in both of these movies, particularly The Best Years of Our Lives; I've always been perplexed how she missed out on an Oscar nomination that year, particularly considering 1946 was the first year where someone who was generally thought of as a "leading lady" (Anne Baxter) ended up winning the supporting prize, something that is commonplace today but was not done with regularity in the early years of the Academy.  So unlike Sheridan, who started out as a pretty much blank slate, I go in already liking Mayo, and in some ways it feels like a cheat to include her in "leading ladies whom I don't know very well."

But the reality is that Mayo's work as a leading performer is almost completely alien to me.  I've never seen her in a musical role, which was her bread-and-butter during her time at Warner (while her voice was dubbed, she was a terrific dancer).  The hope in February will be that I get to learn more about Mayo as a star, and not just know her from key supporting parts in famed classics.  If you have a favorite Mayo performance (either name-checked above or from her time as a leading lady), please share it below in the comments-I look forward to spending the month with a woman once described by the Sultan of Morocco as "tangible proof of the existence of God."