I apologize in advance for the length of this post. I got a little carried away, and didn't quite realize how long it was turning out to be as I was writing it. I'm sorry if it's too long, but I feel that unlike many of the more famous classic stars, the facts of whose lives are more well-known, Glenda Farrell deserves to be written about in more detail, as few people know much about her. The OP described this thread as "a love letter to Glenda", and my post is very much in that spirit. However, if the length of this post makes it poor etiquette, against board rules, or for some other reason should be removed, please inform me.
Glenda Farrell was born in Enid, Oklahoma on June 30, 1901 (as confirmed by both the 1910 and 1920 censuses, and later by the Social Security Administration when she was issued SSN 573-03-9877). Like many actresses of the time, she shaved a few years off her real age, resulting in her date of birth almost always being listed as June 30, 1904.
Her mother, Wilhemina "Minnie" Farrell, had always aspired to be an actress, and failing to become one, lived her dreams through her daughter. When Glenda was still very young, the Farrells moved to Wichita, Kansas, where she made her stage debut as Little Eva in
Uncle Tom's Cabin and received an education at the Mount Carmel Catholic Academy (She remained a devout Catholic for her entire life). The family later moved to San Diego, California, where she joined the Virginia Brissac players.
In 1920, Glenda met Thomas Richards, a young WWI veteran, at a Navy benefit ball. The two instantly fell in love. As Thomas Richards was poor and without a job (he was discharged from the Navy not long after they met), Wilhemina Farrell would drive him away whenever he came to the Farrell's house. Nevertheless, Glenda and Thomas would often meet at a local candy shop. When Glenda took a train to Hollywood for a screen test, Thomas secretly came with her, and they were married during the trip. When the newlyweds returned, they moved in with Glenda's parents, until they could make enough money to move. They soon left, and traveled from town to town, performing in their vaudeville act.
After a while, Glenda became pregnant, which eventually made it impossible for her to continue dancing in the vaudeville act. As a result, she took two jobs, but there still wasn't enough money, so they moved back in with the Farrells. In 1921, the baby, Tommy, was born. Sadly, their once-blissful marriage soon started to deteriorate. Thomas Richards, partially because of his war wounds, and partially because of financial woes, became an alcoholic. When he was drunk, he would sometimes become violent, and he often would disappear, sometimes for entire months. Glenda tried to keep the marriage together, but as he got worse and worse, there was eventually no choice but to divorce him, which she did in 1929. In 1932, her son Tommy had his last name officially changed from Richards to Farrell. Despite the divorce, she bore no grudges against Thomas Richards, and even managed to help him get a job working as a film editor.
Glenda and Tommy Farrell.
In 1928, Glenda went to New York (leaving Tommy in Wilhemina's care) and began her Broadway career. Due to her critically-praised performance in the play
On the Spot, Warner Brothers hired her to act in
Little Caesar. Afterwards, she returned to Broadway. When she was offered a deal from another theater, she managed to bargain with the one she was working for, and her name was put up in lights. Wilhemina Farrell had once told her,
"Don't give up the stage until your name is in lights. When your name gets on a marquee, my work will be done." The very night Glenda Farrell's name first went up in lights, Wilhemina Farrell died.
In 1932, she signed a five-year Warner Brothers contract. Jack Warner quickly put her to work, often in as many as three movies at once. Her work payed off, and she quickly acquired much popularity, and before long had earned enough money to buy a house for herself and Tommy in the San Fernando Valley, and another nearby house for her father.
Among Glenda Farrell's early 1930s Warner Brothers movies were a number of movies in which she and Joan Blondell costarred, usually as a pair of gold-diggers. They were friends off-screen as well, so much so that Joan Blondell wrote a tribute called
My Friend Glenda. Among the things she wrote:
"Glenda is at all times very natural. She isn't one bit camera conscious ... Her movements are always quick and her speech spontaneous. When she goes into a scene she never follows the script to the sacrifice of her naturalness ... She is the fastest thinker I've ever seen ... Working with Glenda is splendid for me, but hardly fair to her ... Glenda and I do the same type of role which means that she must share her honors with me. With most girls such a state of affairs just wouldn't work, they would want their honors all to themselves. Not so with Glenda. In fact, she goes to the other extreme to build me up in my comedy."
"No one would be able to enjoy a case of the blues with Glenda around. She would start to console you and before you realized it, you'd be laughing ... She just can't help but be funny ... Glenda is forever doing thoughtful things for others and seems instinctively to know just what to do and when to do it ... God bless Glenda."
Despite the hardboiled characters Glenda Farrell often played, she was a "softie" in real life. She was generous to a fault, so much so that she owned three vacuum cleaners and several sets of encyclopedias because she couldn't say no to salespeople. She once said,
"Really, I'm not the least bit like the roles I play. In movies I'm usually cast as a wisecracking, golddigging dame, you know. But actually I never wisecrack ... And as for golddigging, I've never been able to wangle a thing. Everything I've ever had, I've worked for and paid myself."
Original caption: March 01, 1935 - The cat is "Frankie," house pet of Glenda Farrell, screen star, and is shown here with his mistress, and his glasses, the first ever fitted for a feline. Glenda felt so sorry for the animal which was continually bumping into furniture all over the house, that she scoured Hollywood until she found an optician who obliged her, and Frankie.
The story of how
His Girl Friday came to be is a well-known one. Howard Hawks was adapting the famed stage play
The Front Page, but changed the male reporter in the play, Hildy Johnson, into a woman, and added a formerly non-existent love story between the two leads. What's not as commonly known is that almost the exact same thing happened several years earlier. In 1936, Warner Brothers began to develop an adaption of the
MacBride and Kennedy stories by Frederick Nebel. For the movie version, the male reporter Kennedy is changed to a female reporter named Torchy Blane, who is now in love with Steve McBride.
Director Frank MacDonald immediately knew who he wanted for the role of Torchy Blane: Glenda Farrell. She was quickly casted in
Smart Blonde, the first Torchy Blane movie. Torchy Blane was a special role for her. She took the role as something of a challenge, and sought to differentiate Torchy from other screen sob-sisters of the era:
"They were caricatures of newspaperwomen as I knew them. So before I undertook to do the first Torchy, I determined
to create a real human being - and not an exaggerated comedy type. I met those who visited Hollywood, and watched them work on visits to New York City. They were generally young, intelligent, refined and attractive. Until Torchy arrived on the scene, most women reporters were portrayed as either sour old maids, masculine-looking feminists or twittery young girls who couldn’t wait to be rescued from tabloid drudgery by some bright young man. But Torchy Blane was a real girl. I made her bright, attractive, intelligent, daring and single-minded, able to hold her own. Sure, she loved McBride, but she had her own career and wasn’t about to settle for keeping house and raising kids while he brought home the bacon. By making Torchy true to life, I tried to create a character practically unique in movies.”
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#5 in a series of 48 "My Favorite Part" Gallaher tobacco cards. On the front of each card was a photograph of a popular star, and on the back, the star's concisely written answer to a query as to which movie role was his or her favorite.
Smart Blonde was a surprise hit, and took Glenda Farrell's popularity to a new level, and she went on to star in several more Torchy Blane movies. In
Torchy Gets Her Man, she famously made an almost 400-word speech in a mere forty seconds. When her Warner Brothers contract expired, she and Barton MacLane were replaced with Lola Lane and Paul Kelly, with less than desirable results. Audiences didn't like the recasting decision, so Warner Brothers managed to get Glenda Farrell back, and made three more Farrell/MacLane Torchy Blane movies. The last Farrell/MacLane Torchy Blane movie,
Torchy Runs for Mayor, is very reminiscent of the real-life 1937 event in which Glenda was elected honorary Mayor of North Hollywood (beating her competition, Bing Crosby and Lewis Stone, 3 to 1).
In the ninth Torchy Blane movie,
Torchy Blane...Playing with Dynamite, Glenda Farrell was replaced with Jane Wyman (who had previously played a bit part in
Smart Blonde), and Barton MacLane with Alan Jenkins. Jane Wyman gave a better performance than Lola Lane, even attempting to copy Glenda Farrell's style down to the fingertips. However, try as she might, her performance didn't measure up to Glenda's. Audiences again disliked the casting change, and
Playing With Dynamite became the last Torchy Blane movie. A leftover Torchy Blane script was adapted into
Private Detective, also starring Jane Wyman.
Among the many fans of the Torchy Blane movies was a young aspiring comic book writer named Jerry Siegel, who along with Joe Shuster, was creating a soon to be legendary creation called
Superman. He liked Glenda Farrell's portrayal of Torchy Blane so much that he based a character named Lois Lane on her. Due to the fact that he took the name Lois Lane from Lola Lane, who also portrayed the character, it is often mistakenly believed that it was Lola Lane's portrayal that inspired him to create the character. But this is not the case; only the name came from Lola Lane. In a letter to the New York Times, he wrote:
Thank you for saying "Happy Birthday" to Superman [SHOW BUSINESS, March 14]. Joe Shuster and I, the co-creators of
Superman appreciate it. My wife Joanne was Joe's original art model for Superman's girlfriend Lois Lane back in the 1930s. Our
heroine was, of course, a working girl whose priority was grabbing scoops. What inspired me in the creation was Glenda Farrell,
the movie star who portrayed Torchy Blane, a gutsy, beautiful headline-hunting reporter, in a series of exciting motion pictures.
Because the name of the actress Lola Lane (who also played Torchy) appealed to me, I called my character Lois Lane. Strangely,
the characterization of Lois is amazingly like the real-life personality of my lovely wife.
Jerry Siegel
Los Angeles
His wife, Joanne Carter Siegel, when asked if Lois was based on Rosalind Russell's portrayal of Hildy Johnson in
His Girl Friday, responded:
"He got the inspiration for Lois Lane from a movie star before Rosalind Russell. Her name was Glenda Farrell and she played a girl reporter, very fast-talking, and she always got the story."
Starting in 1939, Glenda starting primarily acting on stage again, but occasionally took movie roles. She preferred stage acting to movie acting. She explained it thusly: "
There's something more satisfying about working in a play. You get that immediate response from the audience, and you feel that your performance is your own. In pictures you get frustrated because you feel you have no power over what you're doing." During one performance in the play
Separate Rooms, she sprained her ankle backstage. A stagehand went and asked if there was a doctor in the house. There was. His name was Dr. Henry Ross, and he and Glenda immediately hit it off. After she made several follow-up visits to his doctor's office, they began dating, and were married on January 19, 1941. This was Glenda Farrell's second and last marriage. The couple remained happily married until her death thirty years later.
Glenda Farrell and Dr. Henry Ross.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Glenda Farrell appeared in a few movies, and a number of television shows. On May 26, 1963, she won an Emmy for her performance in the
Ben Casey two-parter
A Cardinal Act of Mercy. She also appeared in the Elvis Presley movie
Kissin' Cousins , as did her son Tommy, who later reminisced that Elvis treated Glenda as if she was his mother. Interestingly, there was to be a scene in
Kissin' Cousins where Glenda flips Elvis off of a porch, but she broke her neck (fortunately not badly) doing the scene. She had to wear a neck brace for the duration of the filming, and only took it off for a few minutes at a time when she had to do a take.
In the late 1960s, she decided to try retiring and spending more time at home, but grew hopelessly bored. She returned to the stage in the play
40 Carats, and received rave reviews for her performance. Unfortunately, she became ill after only a few weeks, and was diagnosed with lung cancer. She died on May 1, 1971 in her Manhattan apartment. Her cause of death was cruelly ironic. You see, she never smoked. Tommy Farrell explained:
"She never smoked a day in her life. When she did a picture with Paul Muni, Hi Nellie, they had her smoking. But they
built prop cigarettes with just a little tobacco on the end. You couldn't inhale because they were full of cardboard in between. It would
only burn for a little while. When they would do a short scene, they would have to cut and give her another cigarette because she
wouldn't take any smoke in her mouth."
Glenda Farrell herself had once quipped that her character in
Hi, Nellie was one of her hardest roles, saying,
"The character was always sitting at a typewriter with a cigarette dangling from her mouth, and I can't type and I don't smoke."
Glenda Farrell's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
It's sad that Glenda Farrell is almost forgotten these days. She was a great actress, and by all accounts, a very nice person. She injected life and boundless energy into each of her performances. I've seen a lot of great actors and actresses, but very few have endeared themselves to me as much as Glenda Farrell. There's something about her that could only be described as magical.