Rocky producer Gene Kirkwood has acquired life and some music rights for the late Oscar winner Judy Holliday and will turn her story into the biopic Smart Blonde.
This story is too good to not be told. I have always been a fan of Judy Holliday, and knew she wasn’t a “dumb blonde.” Her comedy timing and instincts were spot on! I knew the “men who owned Hollywood” were not good employers. For a while, Judy was blacklisted as a “communist” when she put one of them in his place. She left Hollywood and returned to Broadway and from there put her career back in the spotlight, with some help from her friends.
The actress was a 22-year-old day player at Fox when she stood up to mogul Darryl F. Zanuck’s aggressive sexual overtures. “Her agent scheduled her for the notorious ‘4 o’clock meeting’ and ordered her to stuff her bra,” says Pulitzer-nominated playwright Willy Holtzman, who is writing the screenplay. At the meeting, Zanuck locked the door, unzipped his pants and pushed Holliday onto the couch as he grabbed her breasts. “He said, ‘You belong to me.’ Judy reached into her blouse, removed the pads from her bra, threw them at him and shouted, ‘These belong to you. I don’t,’ ” adds Holtzman. A link about the “casting couch.”
A tough New Yorker with an IQ of 172, Holliday returned home and went to Broadway. In 1946, she starred in Born Yesterday and won a best actress Oscar for the 1950 big-screen adaptation. Still, she paid the price for being outspoken and was eventually blacklisted in Hollywood as a communist.
- “You have to be smart to play a dumb blonde over and over and keep the audience’s attention without extraordinary physical equipment.”
- Despite her image as a “dumb blonde”, Judy Holliday had an IQ of 172. She often said that it took a lot of smarts to convince people that her characters were stupid.
- To help build up Holliday’s image, particularly in the eyes of Columbia Pictures chief Harry Cohn, Katharine Hepburn deliberately leaked stories to the gossip columns suggesting that her performance in “Adam’s Rib” (1949) was so good that it had stolen the spotlight from Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. This got Cohn’s attention and Holliday won the part of Billie Dawn in “Born Yesterday” (1950, below), as well as the Academy Award for Best Actress, defeating Gloria Swanson, nominated for “Sunset Boulevard,” Eleanor Parker, for “Caged,” and Bette Davis and Anne Baxter, both for “All About Eve.”
- In 1950, Holliday’s name appeared on a list of 151 “pro-Communist” artists in the conservative publication “Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and TV”. The next year, she was subpoenaed by Senator Pat McCarran’s Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, which was investigating subversion and Communist activity in the entertainment industry. She appeared before the committee on March 26, 1952, with Simon H. Rifkind as her legal counsel.
- Holliday was advised to play dumb, as in her film portrayal of Billie Dawn, and she did – often to comedic effect. Holliday later wrote of the experience to her friend Heywood Hale Broun: “Woodie, maybe you’re ashamed of me, because I played Billie Dawn … But I’m not ashamed of myself, because I didn’t name names. That much I preserved.” The investigation “did not reveal positive evidence of any membership in the Communist Party” and was concluded after three months, unlike many others tainted by the anti-Communist investigation. (IMDb/Wikipedia)
Judy Holliday (born Judith Tuvim, June 21, 1921 – June 7, 1965) was an American actress, comedian and singer. She began her career as part of a nightclub act before working in Broadway plays and musicals. Her success as Billie Dawn in the 1946 stage production of Born Yesterday led to her being cast in the 1950 film version for which she won an Academy Award for Best Actress and a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy
I just rewatched another of her comedies, The Solid Gold Cadillac. Judy was a charmer. Her brilliance was on full display. I am looking forward to her Biop coming soon.
A fuller bio of her is in the link included.
Holliday, Judy (1921–1965) | Encyclopedia.com
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