Each actor started in the movies in a different
way. Stanwyck, who was born Ruby Stevens in
Brooklyn in 1907, started on the Broadway stage
and went to Hollywood at the age of twenty-one.
The studios changed her name (Stanwyckhas the
vaguely British aura that Hollywood admired—all
the more amusing considering that Ms. Stevens
never really lost her New York accent). Overall, she
made more than a hundred movies and was nomi-
nated four times for the Oscar for Best Actress in a
Leading Role: for her work in Stella Dallas, Howard
Hawks’s Ball of Fire(1941), Billy Wilder’s Double
Indemnity(1944), and Anatole Litvak’s Sorry,Wrong
Number(1948). She never won.
Michelle Williams is one of a younger generation
of actors—including Carey Mulligan (Lone Scher-
fig’s An Education, 2009), Jennifer Lawrence
(Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone, 2010), and Jessica
Chastain (Terence Malick’s The Tree of Life, 2011)—
who are enriching the art of acting. Williams was
born in Kalispell, Montana, in 1980, and was raised
in San Diego, California, where, after completing
the ninth grade, she quit school to pursue an acting
career. Between 1993 and 1998, she appeared in
various television productions, including Dawson’s
Creek. With her gamine-like features, she began her
movie career with comedies—Andrew Fleming’s
Dickand Jamie Babbitt’s But I’m a Cheerleader, both
1999—before moving on to serious drama with Erik
Skjoldbjærg’s Prozac Nation(2001). Between 1999
and 2010, 11 years, she’d completed 21 movies.
She is best known for her portrayals of intelligent,
determined women, including Emily in Thomas
McCarthy’s The Station Agent(2003); Alma in Ang
Lee’s Brokeback Mountain(2005), for which she was
nominated for an Oscar as Best Supporting
Actress; Wendy in Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and
Lucy(2008); and Emily in Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff
(2010). She was nominated for an Oscar as Best
Actress in Blue Valentine.
Barbara Stanwyck in King Vidor’s Stella Dallas
Stella Dallas, based on Olive Higgins Prouty’s 1923
novel of the same title, tells the story of a brassy,
scheming, but charming young woman from a
working-class family who is openly derided by
members of the middle and upper middle classes
but who has married Stephen Dallas (John Boles),
a socially prominent man.^48 Although they have a
daughter, Laurel (Anne Shirley), the Dallases sepa-
rate when they realize that their social and educa-
tional backgrounds are too different for them to be
happy together.Barbara Stanwyck in Stella DallasIn King Vidor’s
Stella Dallas(1937)—a melodramatic weeper that in
Hollywood’s golden age was also considered a “woman’s
movie”—the title character is a loving mother who sacrifices
everything for her daughter’s happiness. In this image, Stella
(Barbara Stanwyck, right) arranges for her ex-husband and
his fiancée, Helen Morrison (Barbara O’Neil, left) to raise her
daughter, Laurel (Anne Shirley), as their own. Despite the
obvious differences between the two women, they are united
in their maternal concerns. Stanwyck received an Oscar
nomination for Best Actress in a Leading Role; Shirley, for
Best Actress in a Supporting Role. To compare their
performances to other actors’ handling of the same roles,
see Henry King’s Stella Dallas(1925), starring Belle Bennett
and Lois Moran, and John Erman’s Stella(1990), starring
Bette Midler and Trini Alvarado.(^48) Stella Dallashas been of interest to many feminist critics;
see E. Ann Kaplan, “The Case of the Missing Mother:
Maternal Issues in Vidor’s Stella Dallas” and Linda Williams,
“‘Something Else besides a Mother’: Stella Dallasand
the Maternal Melodrama”—both in Feminism and Film, ed.
E. Ann Kaplan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000),
pp. 466–478, 479–504.
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