Occupation actress Years active 1901–1957 | Name Marjorie Rambeau Role Film actress | |
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Other names Majorie RambeauFlorence Rambeau Parents Marcel Rambeau, Lilian Garlinda Kindelberger Nominations Academy Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role Movies Tobacco Road, Torch Song, A Man Called Peter, Man of a Thousand Faces, Min and Bill Similar People Willard Mack, Gregory La Cava, Clarence Brown, George Fitzmaurice, Joseph Pevney | ||
Marjorie Rambeau ID 112162
Marjorie Rambeau (July 15, 1889 – July 6, 1970) was an American film and stage actress.
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Early life
Rambeau was born in San Francisco to Marcel and Lilian Garlinda (née Kindelberger) Rambeau. Her parents separated when she was a child. She and her mother went to Nome, Alaska, where young Marjorie dressed as a boy, sang, and played the banjo in saloons and music halls. Her mother insisted she dress as a boy to thwart amorous attention from drunken grown men in such a wild and woolly outpost as Nome. She began performing on the stage at the age of 12. She attained theatrical experience in a rambling early life as a strolling player. Finally she made her Broadway debut on March 10, 1913, in a tryout of Willard Mack's play, Kick In.
Career
In her youth she was a Broadway leading lady. In 1921, Dorothy Parker memorialized her in verse:
If all the tears you shed so lavishly / Were gathered, as they left each brimming eye. / And were collected in a crystal sea, / The envious ocean would curl up and dry— / So awful in its mightiness, that lake, / So fathomless, that clear and salty deep. / For, oh, it seems your gentle heart must break, / To see you weep. ...
Her silent films with the Mutual company included Mary Moreland and The Greater Woman (1917). The films were not major successes but did expose Rambeau to film audiences. By the time talkies came along she was in her early forties and she began to take on character roles in films such as Min and Bill, The Secret Six, Laughing Sinners, Grand Canary, Joe Palooka, and Primrose Path, for which she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.
In 1940, Rambeau had the title role in Tugboat Annie Sails Again as well as second billing under Wallace Beery (the co-star of the original Tugboat Annie) in 20 Mule Team; she also played an Italian mother in East of the River. Other films included Tobacco Road, A Man Called Peter, and Broadway. In 1953, she was again nominated for an Oscar, this time for Torch Song. In 1957, she appeared in a supporting role in Man of a Thousand Faces, a biographical film about the life of Lon Chaney, although she never worked with the real Chaney in silent films.
Rambeau played a supporting role in Min and Bill with Marie Dressler. Tugboat Annie was a follow up to Min and Bill, even though it was not a sequel. Rambeau replaced Dressler after her death as Tugboat Annie in the sequel Tugboat Annie Sails Again .
For her contribution to the motion picture industry, Rambeau has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6336 Hollywood Blvd.
Legacy
According to author and New York Daily Mirror theatre critic Bernard Sobel the Reuben sandwich was invented for Marjorie Rambeau upon a visit to Reuben's Restaurant and Delicatessen in New York City.
Private life
Rambeau was descended from colonial immigrant Peter Gunnarsson Rambo, who immigrated in the 1600s from Sweden to New Sweden and served as a justice on the Governor's Council. He was the longest living of the original settlers and became known as the "Father of New Sweden".
Rambeau was married three times, she had no children:
Death
She died at her home in Palm Springs, California and was buried at the Desert Memorial Park in Cathedral City, California.
Silent
Sound