Rosemary DeCamp spent a career playing other people's mothers, often older than she was, in film, on radio and for two long runs on television. She was rarely given much to do, and she was reliable in it.
Fi1m perspective
In Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) she is Nellie Cohan, mother of the Four Cohans and of James Cagney's George, and the family scenes belong to Walter Huston, whose quiet exasperation with his son keeps them funny rather than sour. DeCamp's job is to stand beside him and make the act look like a family, and she does it. She was in her early thirties, playing mother to the star, and nobody in the audience was meant to notice. Nobody did.
That was the pattern. She began on radio in 1937 as Judy Price on Dr. Christian and stayed with the programme for its whole run, and when film came calling with Cheers for Miss Bishop (1941) it was Warner Bros. that kept her through the 1940s and into the 1950s, mostly as somebody's mother. The grey was often applied in the make-up chair, since the studio kept casting her older than the actors playing her children. By On Moonlight Bay (1951) and By the Light of the Silvery Moon (1953) she was Doris Day's mother, Alice Winfield, and the nostalgic musical had found its ideal parent: warm, capable, small-town and never in the way.
The one early part that breaks the pattern is the one we like best. In Hold Back the Dawn (1941) she is Berta Kurz, half of a young couple stuck in a Mexican border hotel alongside a professor who has stopped counting the days and Charles Boyer's gigolo, hoping their child can be born on the American side. It is a small part in a film that belongs to Boyer and Olivia de Havilland, and we found ourselves watching the Kurzes' corner of the lobby more than the script asked us to, because Berta is the only person there whose wait has a date attached. The film was made while the refugees were still arriving, and DeCamp plays her as someone who knows it.
She once said she had "this non-aggressive motherly look", and the industry took her at her word. It cost her leading parts; a woman who could pass for sixty at thirty was not going to be asked to play thirty. Television, which wanted exactly what the studios had wanted, gave her the longest runs of her career: Margaret MacDonald, the widowed sister keeping house on The Bob Cummings Show (1955–1959), and Helen Marie, mother to Marlo Thomas across four seasons of That Girl (1966–1970).
Watch her in Yankee Doodle Dandy for the way she listens to Cagney rather than for anything she says, and then find Hold Back the Dawn, where for once the waiting is hers. She was not asked to carry a film, and she never dropped one.
Biography
Rosemary DeCamp, also credited as Rosemary Shirley DeCamp, was an American actress who worked in radio, film and television. She first gained prominence in radio, playing Judy Price in the long-running series Dr. Christian from 1937 and appearing in the syndicated soap opera The Career of Alice Blair (1939–1940).
DeCamp made her film debut in Cheers for Miss Bishop (1941) and appeared as Berta Kurz in Hold Back the Dawn (1941). She is known for roles including Nellie Cohan in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), Messua in Jungle Book (1942), and Alice Winfield in On Moonlight Bay (1951) and its sequel By the Light of the Silvery Moon (1953). On television she played Margaret MacDonald in The Bob Cummings Show (1955–1959) and Peg Riley in the early television version of The Life of Riley.
