Jane Darwell was the woman Hollywood sent for when a family needed holding together, and for more than thirty years she did it without hurry. She was typecast, she knew it, and in The Grapes of Wrath she showed what the type could bear.
Fi1m perspective
Before the Joads leave Oklahoma, Ma sits alone by the stove with a box of things she cannot take. A postcard, a china dog, a pair of earrings. She holds the earrings up to her ears in front of a small mirror, and John Ford holds the shot, and Alfred Newman keeps the music out, and Jane Darwell does not cry. It moved us more than we were ready for, and it did so because she plays it as a woman making a decision rather than a woman being pitied. Everything else she does in The Grapes of Wrath (1940) follows from that stove: broad, unhurried, the person who decides when the truck leaves.
She had been on stage from about 1909 and in silents for Lasky from 1913, went back to the theatre, and came back to the screen in 1930 with Tom Sawyer. Short, stout and plain-featured, she was under contract to 20th Century Fox and cast, again and again, as mothers, grandmothers and housekeepers. She made five films with Shirley Temple. She was Mrs Merriwether in Gone with the Wind (1939). By her own account she grew tired of the small-town wives and genial mothers, and it is hard to blame her.
Then Ford handed her Ma Joad. She said it was "a grand part", and it is the one time the type was asked to carry a whole film rather than furnish it. Henry Fonda plays her son with his voice kept low and his hands still; she plays his mother as the fixed point he moves around. They made three films together, and she made three with Ford, including My Darling Clementine (1946), where she is Kate Nelson. When she was let off the type, as Ma Grier leading the lynch mob in The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), the same stillness came out as something colder, and we would like to have seen more of that.
What she did well is easy to name and hard to do. She did not ask to be liked. She did not play warmth; she played someone who had things to get done and would be warm if there was time. The weakness was never hers; it was the studio's, which found a shape that worked and kept pouring into it.
Her last part, in Mary Poppins (1964), was the Bird Woman, and Disney had to ask her for it in person. After more than thirty years of getting other people's families onto the truck, she ended by sitting still. It suited her.
Biography
Jane Darwell was an American actress of stage, film and television. Born Patti Woodard on 15 October 1879 in Palmyra, Missouri, she studied voice, piano and dramatics before making her stage debut and entering silent films around 1913–1914. She appeared in more than 100 feature films over five decades.
Darwell is best known for her role as Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath (1940), for which she received the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Other credits include Mrs Merriwether in Gone with the Wind (1939), roles in The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) and My Darling Clementine (1946), and the Bird Woman in Mary Poppins (1964). She also appeared in The White Parade (1934) as Sailor Roberts. She received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and died on 13 August 1967 in Los Angeles, California.
