Greer Garson

True Blue

When she made her film debut in Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939), Greer Garson was in her mid-thirties, which was somewhat late to begin a career playing leads on screen in that era. Born in England, but of Irish and Scottish descent, Garson had also gotten a late start on stage in her late twenties, and when she was signed to MGM by Louis B. Mayer, she knew that just the right role was necessary to put her over, and she had the strength to hold out for it.

Robert Donat’s Mr. Chipping in Goodbye, Mr. Chips is a teacher who isn’t well liked or too good at his job until he has the luck to meet Garson’s suffragette Katherine while climbing a mountain. Garson gets a “she’s a star!” dolly in to her face when we finally see Katherine emerge through the fog, smiling, and then smiling wider so that it nearly closes her eyes. What Garson provides here is difficult to describe, because charm like hers is intangible, but in this first movie her charm is suffused with hints of playfulness and wit, and it is somehow both warm and a touch chilly at once.

When she laughs, it is a faint, lingering “Ah ha ha ha” that beguiles Donat’s Mr. Chipping, and she starts calling him Chips. Katherine knows that he is shy, and shut down, but she sees and feels what possibilities he has and delights in bringing them out, and she falls in love with him just as surely as he falls in love with her, gradually, like light dawning in the morning.

Garson’s Katherine is so graciously responsive when Chipping talks to her, and so sensitive to him that she knows she must take the initiative with him. Katherine kisses him in a “So there!” way when he is seeing her off at a train station, and she has danced with him in a way that lets us know that she can teach him what to do in bed, too, when they are married. She magically improves his image at the school, and she falls in love with his profession as well.

Garson is on screen in Goodbye, Mr. Chips for around a half hour, for her character dies in childbirth, but it feels right that she received an Oscar nomination for best actress in a very competitive year because her Katherine dominates the movie with that limited screen time. As Chips goes on with his life, he keeps a photo of Katherine on his desk, and her love for him has transformed him for good. This is a very romantic notion, and all the more romantic because both the gifted Donat and Garson have made it so believable.

Garson is even better as Elizabeth Bennet in a sumptuous MGM version of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1940), and in her first close-up she has the sort of droll wit that characterized Emma Thompson when she first emerged in the early 1990s, a rare quality for a female movie star. Garson’s Elizabeth is smart and spirited and doesn’t particularly care about getting herself a husband, and of course this begins to intrigue the proud Mr. Darcy (Laurence Olivier).

There is a slight Irish lilt to Garson’s way of speaking here that gives her wit in this movie its distinctive sparkle, especially when she tells a snobby social enemy, “Oh, if you want to be really refined you have to be dead,” rapping out the last words musically as “you-have-to-be-dead” before pausing and slowly and just as musically concluding, “There’s no one as dignified as a mummy.” It is hard to think of any other actress of this time who could have delivered lines like this with such a feeling of intellectual playfulness and spontaneity.

Garson’s physical alarm when pursued by an unwanted suitor in Pride and Prejudice is enjoyably satirical, partly because it feels both like a choice from Garson and a choice for her character, and she seems to have all the qualities to play high comedy, sophisticated comedy; it is easy to imagine the Garson of this film playing Shakespeare’s Rosalind and Viola, too. She is so good in Pride and Prejudice that she never seems to be relying on technique, for she is fully involved at all times.

But Pride and Prejudice, which is the best thing Garson ever did, was not a financial success, and she was not nominated for an Oscar for it, but she won a second nomination for a biopic called Blossoms in the Dust (1941), a Technicolor fictionalization of the life of an adoption pioneer named Edna Gladney in which it was ominously clear right away that Garson was willing to walk through a part on a note of one-dimensional charm, graciousness, and ceaseless nobility.

A little of her Irish fire comes out in the Big Scene at the end of Blossoms in the Dust where she harangues the Texas legislature with the line, “There are no illegitimate babies…only illegitimate parents!” and roars out the word “parents,” but this sort of inspirational picture has not aged well, to put it mildly. What happened with Garson is a little like what happened with Glenda Jackson when she emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. For a brief period, lots of people were excited by Garson and by Jackson until it became evident that they gave the same sort of performance in everything.

Garson appeared opposite Joan Crawford in When Ladies Meet (1941), and Crawford eyed her warily and seethed behind the scenes because MGM was clearly positioning Garson as the successor to Norma Shearer as the inheritor of all the “great lady” parts on offer. Garson got her most famous role in the World War II propaganda hit Mrs. Miniver (1942) only after Shearer turned it down, partly because Shearer did not want to play the mother of a grown son.

That film was important for its moment for less than creative reasons, and it feels deliberately tedious in its first hour until the key scene where Garson’s Mrs. Miniver must confront and disarm a downed German pilot. When this young Nazi pilot tells her that there will be more men from his country coming soon to destroy her country, Garson gets a close-up where she raises her right eyebrow in distaste and alarm, and there were times in her “great lady” period at MGM where all she seemed to do was raise that eyebrow and smile her way through scenes.

But the really key scene in Mrs. Miniver is the one that comes after the tense German flyer sequence where Garson’s Kay Miniver makes light of the experience in the bedroom with her husband (Walter Pidgeon, who partnered Garson is quite a few of her vehicles). The “moving right along” implication of this scene is still very cheering, and the late scene where the Minivers sit in a bomb shelter with their children and try to quell their rising panic still has its power. Is Mrs. Miniver a good movie? I don’t know. I suppose not. Yet during the 2020 pandemic and its aftermath when I had to get shots and needed a stiff upper lip, I thought to myself, “Just be Mrs. Miniver,” and that got me through, and that’s not nothing.

Garson won the Academy Award for best actress for Mrs. Miniver and also won some notoriety for an acceptance speech that began with the line, “I am practically unprepared” and then went on for over five minutes; there is around a minute of footage of this speech that survives, and in it Garson is expressing her gratitude for being welcomed to America with such open arms, and she seems heartfelt and winning in it. Yet some factions in Hollywood immediately began to mock her speech, and a legend grew that she went on for 45 minutes, and then an hour, and so forth, but it only felt like that to these catty people. This gave the signal that Garson was now a mockable figure, and this was only heightened by her other release that year, Random Harvest (1942), which is filled with “Isn’t she lovely?” close-ups of her and features one of the most unlikely romantic plots of all time, which was later memorably parodied by Carol Burnett on her TV show as Rancid Harvest.

Garson received three more consecutive Oscar nominations after that for Madame Curie (1943), Mrs. Parkington (1944), and The Valley of Decision (1945), and these are pictures that are only going to be viewed now by the most masochistic Oscar-ologists. Garson is relentlessly noble and sympathetic in all three in a way that offers no relief and gets very monotonous, and they were all financial hits, but with the end of World War II she struggled to keep her audience. Garson is a bit more real than usual in Desire Me (1947), which was begun by George Cukor but finally abandoned by him and left without a director credit.

But then in That Forsyte Woman (1948), an adaptation of the first book of John Galsworthy’s very popular The Forsyte Saga, Garson seemed stimulated again to be the woman of her first work in movies, full-blooded, thoughtful, warm, but with a wayward sexual morality in this case that is all the more stirring for being so unexpected; this return to form went largely unnoticed, perhaps because she had been so noble for so long. The sequel The Miniver Story (1950), in which Kay Miniver is dying after the war, begins badly but gradually improves and becomes modestly touching by the end, mainly because Garson finally lets us see that the woman she is playing can and does have human flaws and frailties.

Writing about Garson’s reign as a heroine in the 1940s, James Agee observed, “If she were not suffocated and immobilized by Metro’s image of her—and, I’m afraid, half-persuaded of it herself—I could imagine her as a very good Lady Macbeth,” and she proved him right in a live TV production of the Lillian Hellman play The Little Foxes (1956) as the amoral Regina Giddens. Garson doesn’t have to adjust her style too much in the early scenes, so that this Regina just has more charm than usual, and so when she gets to the big scenes and reveals all the contempt and malice within Regina, it has a real impact because it’s so unexpected. This is an excellent example of how effective casting against type can be; particularly shocking is the harshness of Garson’s voice when she bellows, “You’ll do no more bargaining in this house!” to her crooked brothers.

Garson proved she had some range again when she played Auntie Mame on stage in the late 1950s, but she was back to Great Lady nobility as Eleanor Roosevelt in Sunrise at Campobello (1960), for which she received her seventh and last Oscar nomination for supporting her husband, wearing false teeth, and approximating Eleanor’s fluting voice. She was semi-retired after that but very active socially with her third husband Buddy Fogelson, a millionaire oilman and horse breeder with whom she lived down in Texas.

Garson looked gorgeous in her eighties and was still as spirited as ever in all her public appearances, and she lived to be 91. The audience today for most of her Oscar vehicles would be limited, but her work in Goodbye, Mr. Chips and Pride and Prejudice is of the highest quality within its range, and her Mrs. Miniver will always be part of our social history. Garson is someone who chose setting an example above all else in most of her work, and this will always be very resistible to some or even most at this point in time. But it served a greater purpose, and for that there should be some respect, while her Katherine and her Elizabeth Bennet are still very easy to love.