Miriam Hopkins

Miriam Hopkins, the quick-witted Georgia-born actress who brought a sharp, sophisticated sparkle to the early talkies, died of a heart attack in New York City on October 9, 1972. She was sixty-nine. Ellen Miriam Hopkins was born in Savannah on October 18, 1902, and spent part of her childhood in Bainbridge, Georgia, before moving north and studying dance. She began as a chorus girl on Broadway in the early 1920s and worked her way into dramatic roles on the New York stage, a training that gave her an unusually crisp sense of timing when Paramount brought her to pictures at the start of the sound era. She was at her best in the stretch of films made before Hollywood's production code was strictly enforced. For Ernst Lubitsch she played a lovestruck princess in The Smiling Lieutenant and a stylish pickpocket in Trouble in Paradise, then shared a famously unconventional arrangement with Fredric March and Gary Cooper in Design for Living. In Rouben Mamoulian's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde she gave a raw, frightened performance as the barmaid Ivy. In 1935 she starred in Becky Sharp, the first feature filmed entirely in three-strip Technicolor, and earned an Academy Award nomination. At Warner Bros. she shared the screen with Bette Davis in The Old Maid and Old Acquaintance, and the rivalry between the two actresses became Hollywood legend. She returned to the stage often, replacing Tallulah Bankhead in The Skin of Our Teeth, and later took character parts, winning notice as the aunt in William Wyler's The Heiress and playing in The Children's Hour, a story she had first filmed decades earlier as These Three. She was known as a demanding colleague and a generous hostess, a woman who read widely and collected friends among writers. She was buried in Bainbridge, the small Georgia town she had always counted as home.