We never learn the first name of the mother played by Gladys Cooper in Now, Voyager (1942), a beloved Bette Davis vehicle. She is known only by her married name, Mrs. Windle Vale, and this is a woman for whom conventions, standards, and manners can be used as weapons and as a kind of fortress against change. Mrs. Vale had three sons before the late birth of Davis’s Charlotte, and she was in her forties when she brought her ugly duckling daughter into the world. Cooper was 54 when she made Now, Voyager, but she is convincingly playing a much older woman, a woman in her seventies, and the lines drawn on her face help the visual impression she needs, as does the white hair, but even as a young woman, when she was a stage star and famous beauty, Cooper had a severe aspect, a look of disdain, that aids her in her most famous film role.
In the first scene of Now, Voyager, the servants are alert because “she” is coming downstairs, and “she” can only be Mrs. Vale, the tyrant of the house. “William!” we hear her cry before we see her, and Cooper sweeps downstairs and into the parlor rooms with the kind of physical authority that can only be attained by long work on the stage where the attention of an audience must be grabbed. She calls Charlotte “my little girl” even though Charlotte is an agonized frump of 35, and there is maybe something sadistic about this. Cooper’s Mrs. Vale holds her hands folded in her lap, but she works them a bit all the same, and this is a link to her daughter, who cannot keep her hands still.
The way that the British Cooper says a phrase like “At once!” in Now, Voyager is very British, but there was probably something like that quality in the society matrons of Boston like Mrs. Vale. This is a woman who is used to giving orders, and when she carps about Charlotte’s romanticism and clear sexual desires she always compares this to her daughter acting “like a servant.” To Mrs. Vale, sex and romance are the province of the lower classes, and the Vales of Boston are of the highest class, in her estimation. “No member of the Vale family has ever had a nervous breakdown!” she insists.
Mrs. Vale has all the hallmarks of a manipulator: pretended “heart trouble” and headaches to control those around her, and she can even be reduced to speaking about who might or might not be in her will if they please or displease her. Crucially, in the scene where Charlotte has been seeing the patrician Elliot Livingston (John Loder), which should at least please Mrs. Vale’s social vanity, she is as frosty as ever, and even frostier, maybe, since her disapproval of Charlotte’s romanticism is so 100% that not even this “feather in the cap” for the social standing of the Vale family can appease her because it comes from such a despised and disreputable source, an unworthy daughter who has kept dirty books hidden in her room.
There is a brief shot of Cooper in this scene where she looks what can only be called evil, and this sort of thing was always of interest to Davis in her films, from Of Human Bondage (1934) onward. Another actress might have used this exchange where Elliot Livingston is discussed as an opening for some kind of insight into Mrs. Vale that could lead to sympathy of some sort, but not Cooper. She has seen and felt the mood of the film, which comes from Davis’s artistic personality, and she is following suit, even to the detail of the restless hands that are the only link between mother and daughter in their war with each other, which Charlotte wins by telling such a horrible truth in such a candid way that she finally kills her mother dead on the spot.
Cooper had worked as a model as a young girl, and she played in pantomime and musical comedy in her youth. She has a disdainful and frankly bored look in some of her photos that must have excited certain men, and this boredom apparently extended to her early stage work in plays with titles like The Pursuit of Pamela. Aldous Huxley panned her performance in the 1919 Somerset Maugham play Home and Beauty thusly: “she is too impassive, too statuesque, playing all the time as if she were Galatea, newly unpetrified and still unused to the ways of the living world.” But by the time she was doing other plays from Maugham sources like The Letter, she had improved, with Maugham himself commending how she had turned herself from an “indifferent” actress into an “extremely competent” one, which doesn’t sound too enthused, but still.
Cooper made a few silent films and took a break from her stage career only at age 50, when she appeared in Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) as one of the many people who made heroine Joan Fontaine nervous. She received an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress for Now, Voyager and another one the following year for her jealous nun in The Song of Bernadette (1943) who softens in a way that Mrs. Vale never could or would. She did a kind of encore of her Mrs. Vale in Separate Tables (1958) and then lived long enough to get menaced on a few episodes of The Twilight Zone in the 1960s, which was fun because she was so clearly meant to be a mean-minded and unsympathetic old lady.
Cooper married three times, and the second marriage to Sir Neville Pearson made her Lady Pearson, which would have impressed even Mrs. Vale. Shortly before her death in 1971, she made an appearance on The Dick Cavett Show with her son-in-law Robert Morley in which Cooper seemed in her attitudes not just out of her time but nearly out of her century. No matter. Her Mrs. Vale lives on. It is impossible to forget the shot of her in Now, Voyager from behind where Mrs. Vale lightly raps her fingers on a bedpost as she thinks on how to keep her daughter Charlotte in her clutches, a moment where Cooper seems like some bird of prey who must be killed with a shot straight to the heart.
Oh this is fabulous. That shot in Now Voyager is bone-chilling. I love how she clearly carries with her into old age the dazzling confidence of someone who once was gorgeous. It's a very specific kind of confidence.