Ann Harding

Free Love Bun

Like many movie stars worth remembering, Ann Harding was a creature of contrasts. Exquisitely beautiful to a nearly unreal degree, especially full face in close-up, Harding had ice-blue eyes and very long Rapunzel-like blonde hair that had never been cut, but she wore it in a bun at the nape of her neck and only let it down for some extremely sexy still photographs. She could seem both young and old, modern and old-fashioned, and her deep and cultivated voice is a pleasure to listen to, particularly when she played in comedies with heart.

In her first close-up in Paris Bound (1929), an adaptation of a Philip Barry play that served as her film debut for Pathe-RKO, Harding looks like a doll somehow come to life with that hairdo that was redolent of the 19th century, yet the hands she habitually places on her hips tell a different story, and when she opens her mouth to speak the alto sound is wry and sophisticated, and it suggests the best of what we think of as the freedom and license of the 1920s; she is like some pre-Raphaelite heroine here who has somehow read Shaw and Elinor Glyn.

Harding was born Dorothy Gatley in Texas, and her military father so deplored her choice of career that she changed her name in order not to embarrass him further, but surely this new name suited her far better than her birth name. She found a mentor in Jasper Deeter and worked with him in repertory theater during the early 1920s before becoming a star on Broadway in The Trial of Mary Dugan, which was filmed with Norma Shearer in 1929. It seems clear that the far more insecure but more electrically charismatic Shearer often attempts to emulate Harding’s poise and wit in her own early talkies.

Harding is a cerebral presence on film; in certain close-ups of Paris Bound, we can see her thinking and considering as her character navigates modern ideas about open marriage that would still cause controversy and comment today nearly 100 years later. Harding moves beautifully, tilting her body for the camera, and she has very sensitive hands. “You have the wisest eyes I’ve ever seen,” Carmelita Geraghty tells her in one scene, and Harding lives up to that line.

Another young actress, Katharine Hepburn, was likely also influenced by Harding’s lyricism, which is far more controlled than Hepburn’s own more flame-like poetic intensity. (Like Hepburn, Harding attended Bryn Mawr college.) Her character Mary in Paris Bound is bohemian, loving, and spiritual, playing Lizst with the same emotion that she gives to the lingering kisses she bestows on her husband (Fredric March).

Harding’s actor husband Harry Bannister appears with her in her second film Her Private Affair (1929), which has a blackmail plot that mirrors a similar situation that sprang up after their divorce in the mid-1930s during an ugly custody battle for their young daughter. Perhaps Harding has some premonition of such future trouble, for she is off her game here, making panicked faces all over the place after shooting her blackmailer, and she is similarly uncontrolled in Condemned with Ronald Colman from that same year.

But Harding gave perhaps her finest film performance and was nominated for an Oscar for her outcast heiress Linda Seton in Holiday (1930), another Philip Barry adaptation in which she has a special quality of slightly over-emphatic enthusiasm that suits the role just as much as it later did for Katharine Hepburn in the better-known 1938 movie of this play, which has the advantage of Cary Grant and Lew Ayres in the main male roles. Holiday in both of its film versions is still very relevant in the way it attacks “the reverence for riches” above all else and endorses creativity, character, empathy, and charm instead.

There is a gender relaxation in the Utopic playroom section of Holiday in which Edward Everett Horton mirrors Harding’s own stylish hand-on-hips pose, and during this sequence there is treasurable role-playing and tender mockery from the sidelines of accepted norms. Mary Astor makes Linda’s establishment-minded sister Julia seem far more seductive and even reasonable than this character feels in the Hepburn version, and so the triumph of Harding’s Linda at the end feels particularly hard-won and blissful. Harding never looked more beautiful or star-like as she does in the final close-up from Holiday because her face is alive with possibility that feels both progressive and subversive.

RKO began to cast her in tearjerking material, an ominous sign of things to come. In East Lynne (1931), an adaptation of a David Belasco stage warhorse, Harding plays her Big Scene where she denounces her sister-in-law in a very theatrical manner, building it vocally and projecting to the rafters and singing her lines; she isn’t bad here, but she is operating in an older style, and audiences came to dread the throb in her voice in punitive melodramas.

But Harding got to play one more Philip Barry heroine on screen in The Animal Kingdom (1932), another movie in which she is pitted against a seductive brunette, this time played by Myrna Loy. Harding’s Daisy has a “queer sort of arrangement” with publisher Leslie Howard, and she is about as attractive a woman of this time period as can possibly be imagined: warm, mature, intimate, self-mocking. “A foolish virgin, me,” Harding says at one point here, and then she takes a pause. “Well, foolish anyway,” she says, and that hesitation Harding takes in between those two lines is worthy of Mae West.

Her Daisy smoothly uses words like “quixotic” and “sylvan,” which emphasizes Harding’s very appealing brainy quality; at her best, Harding has such wit that it seems a shame she never did an outright screwball comedy and instead got stuck in poorly written weepies, which alienated her public. Loy’s Cecilia in The Animal Kingdom is a seductive hypocrite and mean girl who uses sex as a weapon, while Harding’s Daisy is the real new woman, and an ideal that can still be emulated.

“There came a time when any self-respecting cynic would run a mile to avoid an Ann Harding film,” reports John Springer in his book They Had Faces Then, and it became clear that her taste ran to highfalutin, gloomy, and static pictures like The Fountain (1934). But in 1935 Harding was cast in her one classic movie, the staggeringly romantic Peter Ibbetson for Paramount, where she played opposite Gary Cooper. Beloved of surrealists, Peter Ibbetson is about a couple who are fated to love each other from childhood on, and nothing can break them apart, not even imprisonment for Cooper’s Peter or death itself.

In her first close-up in Peter Ibbetson, which comes about a half hour into the film, Harding beautifully gets across the feeling that her character somehow recognizes the man she loves from their shared childhood, and that throaty voice of hers does have an ethereal quality that serves the material. This is the one role Harding played that asks more of her than technique, and you can sometimes see her struggling against the more outright emotional moments and then giving in to them, which makes them more touching; she hits a very effective crazed note of mad love in the dream montages in the last third of the film where she visits Cooper’s Peter as they sleep.

Harding retired from the screen in 1937 but came back to the movies in the 1940s and ‘50s to play supportive maternal figures. In The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956), Harding at age 54 still has her signature hairdo, and her speaking voice sounds even grander than before, so that she seems like a throwback to a different era here, especially in contrast to the very 1950s twitching neuroticism of Jennifer Jones.

Harding made many television appearances before retiring for good in 1965 after a second marriage had ended unhappily in 1962. She lived until 1981, and though she was estranged from her daughter Harding took on a young female companion named Grace Kaye, which proved that she herself was still happy to embody the unconventional bohemianism of her Philip Barry heroines, all three of whom are among the most attractive figures in Pre-Code 1930s cinema.