Why did cinema forget about Eleanor Parker?
Collective memory is a strange thing. We might think that we know everything about classic cinema, but in reality, we’ve just been telling the same narrative over and over until it becomes its own form of truth. Marilyn Monroe holds an outsized position in conversations about the 1950s, obscuring the fact that fellow actors like June Allyson, Betty Grable, and Susan Hayward were just as successful during that period. Similarly, Jeanette McDonald, Jane Withers, and Sonja Henie were some of the most bankable stars in the 1930s, outpacing actors like Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn despite being almost forgotten today.
There are many reasons that we remember some stars and not others. Davis and Hepburn had the benefit of longevity, which ensured that they were contemporary figures for multiple generations of pop culture. Oscars are also a factor, which is a bit unfair considering that, for a while, the ceremony was seen as nothing more than a highly subjective industry-insider event that was more of a popularity contest than an objective metric of artistic merit.
Still, if the latter standard applies, Eleanor Parker should be a widely celebrated figure of Old Hollywood. Throughout her five-decade career, she was nominated for three ‘Best Actress’ Oscars (all of which occurred when the ceremony had become a more formal affair) and won the coveted Volpi Cup at the Venice Film Festival. She had a classically beautiful face, which, coupled with her formidable acting talent, gave her all the ingredients she needed to be a wildly famous and enduring star. These days, however, even fans of Old Hollywood might not have heard of her.
Parker began her career on-screen in the early 1940s, earning her first major role in the 1945 film The Pride of the Marines in 1945 opposite John Garfield. Despite not being a famous star at that point, she tried to assert control over her career, turning down multiple movies and being put on suspension for it by the studio head. In fact, despite being uncomfortable with fame, she was much more assertive than other stars when it came to her career. She turned down roles, took extended breaks to raise her family, and sought out a wide range of characters rather than sticking to generic star vehicles.
She also flat-out refused to change her name the way so many other stars did, including Marilyn Monroe, Joan Crawford, and Lauren Bacall. For this reason, she was often mistaken for another famous Eleanor, the musical star Eleanor Powell, who was one of the most accomplished dancers of her generation. Ultimately, the two bonded over it.
In 1950, Parker landed her most famous role in the film noir Caged. In it, she plays a 19-year-old sentenced to prison for an armed robbery that killed her husband. While navigating the corruption of the justice system, she also has to contend with a surprise pregnancy. It was pretty daring at the time, and its ambiguous ending, in which she is released from prison and resolves to double down on a life of crime, was hardly the sort of Hays Code-sanctioned comeuppance that was expected. She earned rave reviews for her performance, winning the Volpi and earning an Oscar nomination.
Parker continued to tackle tricky roles throughout the rest of the decade, earning two more Academy Award nominations for 1951’s The Detective Story, in which she played Kirk Douglas’s loving wife who is harbouring a painful secret, and 1955’s Interrupted Melody, a biopic of the Australian opera singer Marjorie Lawrence, who contracted polio in the middle of her career.
Perhaps she was too much of a chameleon to be a timeless movie star. Unlike Monroe or Ava Gardner or Lana Turner, Parker was a character actor who never tried to build a unifying persona on-screen. “For me… it was always about the work, not fame,” she said in a 2010 interview at age 88. She also admitted that she was terrified of speaking in front of an audience, saying that she was relieved when she didn’t win any of the Oscars for which she was nominated.
“I am also afraid now that certain people are mad at me about turning down repeated invitations to personal appearances and declining being filmed to discuss acting and my career,” she admitted. “Just thinking about being filmed discussing this or that movie makes me want to faint.” Perhaps she wasn’t concerned with the notoriety, but that shouldn’t make her any less worthy of recognition.
