About this item

Drawing on historical documents and newspaper reports, this book provides a fascinating portrait of a diverse group of character actresses who left their stamp on Hollywood from the early sound era through the 1960s. The lives of 35 actresses are explored in detail. Some are familiar: Margaret Hamilton starred in dozens of films before and after her signature role as the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz; Una Merkel nearly died when her mother committed suicide in 1945. Others are nearly forgotten: Maude Eburne owed her career to a spectacular fall on the Broadway stage in 1914; Greta Meyer, who played the quintessential German maid, came to Hollywood after years in New York's Yiddish theater--though she wasn't Jewish.



About the Author

Axel Nissen

"ACTRESSES OF A CERTAIN CHARACTER is a remarkable work and its author, Professor Axel Nissen, is a remarkable man."

Olivia de Havilland

"Is it at all likely that a Scandinavian academic with the bounding, affectionate enthusiasm of a golden Labrador, a mind like a rat trap, a gift for the acid put-down, the persistence of a tax inspector, the patience of a saint, and the looks of a teen age dilettante should decide to take up as a hobby the study of the lives and work of neglected character actresses? "

Dame Sin Phillips

Among the many good fortunes of my life has been the privilege of having two of my favorite actresses write prefaces to my books. That life started "almost yesterday" in Hamburg, where I was born the son of Norwegian diplomats, and I grew up in places as various as New York, Vancouver, and Seoul. Since 1984, I've been living in my native Norway, where I completed my education with a doctorate in American Literature from the University of Oslo in 1996. I've been working at my alma mater since 1997 and was promoted to Professor of American Literature in 2007.

The University of Oslo, founded in 1811, is Norway's oldest, largest, and most prestigious university. My studies and research have also brought me to Oxford, where I spent the 1991-92 academic year at Wadham College, and to many of the major American universities, such as Columbia, Harvard, Yale, UCLA, and Berkeley, where I spent the 1993-94 academic year on a Fulbright fellowship doing research for my dissertation on the western writer Bret Harte. My dissertation was awarded H.M. the King of Norway's Gold Medal in 1997 and in revised form was published as Bret Harte: Prince and Pauper in 2000. I was very happy to publish my first book with the University Press of Mississippi, who did a beautiful job with it. It was even reviewed in the New York Times Book Review and is still in print!

In 2009 I published what I consider my major scholarly work to date, a book on romantic friendship in nineteenth-century American literature called Manly Love, with the University of Chicago Press. I was thrilled to publish the book with what is by many considered the world's leading academic publisher and to work with their legendary editor Doug Mitchell. Again my publishers did themselves proud in producing an elegant volume. A full overview of my books and articles on American literature is available on my homepage at the University of Oslo: http://www.hf.uio.no/ilos/english/people/aca/nilsni/index.html .

In 2003, I discovered Turner Classic Movies and it changed my life. During the next few years, I amassed the largest private collection of old Hollywood films in Norway and began to consider how I might turn this hobby into further publications. My particular interest was in the many talented and largely forgotten character actresses in classic Hollywood fil



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