Jean Peters was a Fox leading lady who kept refusing to be a siren, and her reputation rests on the tough, plain, outdoor parts she asked for. In the Roman romance we know best she has almost nothing to do, and it shows.
Fi1m perspective
In Three Coins in the Fountain (1954) Jean Peters is Anita Hutchins, a secretary in Rome who says she is leaving to go home and marry, and who is drawn instead to Georgio, the translator across the office, played by Rossano Brazzi. It ought to be the strand that holds the film together. It is the one that goes slack. A visit to his family's farm in the hills is meant to show Anita the life she is missing and shows us a table of extras eating, and Peters stands among them with nothing to want and no way to want it. We were bored, honestly bored, and found ourselves looking at the hills behind Brazzi, which Krasner had at least lit properly.
That is the odd thing about a career that lasted less than a decade. Peters was a farm girl from Ohio who arrived at Fox on a screen test and made her debut opposite Tyrone Power in Captain from Castile (1947), which is the sort of start a studio uses to build a glamour girl. She would not be built. She asked for the plain and the athletic parts, pirates and Native American women and streetwise girls, and she got enough of them to be remembered for them: Josefa in Elia Kazan's Viva Zapata (1952), Nalinle opposite Burt Lancaster in Apache (1954), and above all Candy in Samuel Fuller's Pickup on South Street (1953), a part Fuller gave her rather than Marilyn Monroe.
Those are the films critics still point to, and they point to them for one reason: she is convincing when nobody has asked her to be looked at. Her own account of it is the plainest description of a screen type we know. "Pickup on South Street was fine for my career, but that doesn't mean I'm going to put on a tight sweater and skirt and slither around. I'm just not the type." The trouble was that a studio in the early fifties had few other types to offer a woman under contract. The criticism that stuck to her was that she was typecast, and that for all the solid work she was never counted among the great actresses of her day; Niagara (1953), in which she plays Polly Cutler alongside Monroe and Joseph Cotten, is the film usually named when that case is made.
She left films in 1955, after A Man Called Peter, eight years after she started, and came back only for television between 1973 and 1988. If you are choosing one evening with her, choose Fuller's. Three Coins in the Fountain has Rome and Clifton Webb. It does not have much of Jean Peters.
Biography
Jean Peters (also credited as Elizabeth Jean Peters) was an American actress. Born in Canton, Ohio, she won the Miss Ohio State University pageant in 1945, which led to a screen test and a contract with 20th Century Fox.
She appeared in films including Captain from Castile (1947), Viva Zapata! (1952), Pickup on South Street (1953), Niagara (1953), Apache (1954), Broken Lance (1954) and Three Coins in the Fountain (1954) as Anita Hutchins. She also appeared in the television series Murder, She Wrote (1984). Peters retired from film acting after marrying Howard Hughes in 1957; the couple divorced in 1971. She later married film executive Stan Hough and made occasional television appearances until the late 1980s.
