Moving Work From a Memorable Actress

It is one of the small, cruel tricks of history that catastrophic events can overshadow and overwhelm items that on a quieter day would have deserved their full measure of respectful and sometimes melancholy attention.

The passing of Dorothy McGuire on Sept. 13 occurred within days of the acrid and blinding holocaust of the terrorist attacks. Only now, weeks later, when we have had a chance as a country to catch our breath and look about more calmly, does it seem possible to pay belated respects to a beautiful actress.

I have felt a special poignancy about the death, after long illness, of McGuire because as a teenager in high school I had a crush on the star of “Claudia” (1943), in which she played the naive, childlike bride of Robert Young. It was a role McGuire had created on Broadway.

Her fragile blond beauty was a far cry from that of Rita Hayworth and the other screen sirens of her generation, but her seeming vulnerability was infinitely appealing to me.

Her voice, I came to feel later, was what Shakespeare had in mind for Lear’s daughter Cordelia: “soft, gentle and low, an excellent thing in women.”

Her filmography is rich with memorable performances, including her re-teaming with Young in “The Enchanted Cottage” (1945), in which she was badly disfigured and yet beautiful as long as she remained inside the cottage. She was the mature and wise mother in a “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” (1945) and impressive again as a dramatic actress in “The Dark at the Top of the Stairs” (1960). She had an Oscar nomination for best actress in “Gentleman’s Agreement” (1947) with Gregory Peck, and she played Gary Cooper’s wife in a touching film about the Quakers, “Friendly Persuasion” (1956).

Early in my years in Hollywood, I did an interview with Jane Wyatt and confessed to my youthful admiration for her friend McGuire. A few weeks later, Wyatt invited my wife and me to dinner, and I found myself seated next to the Claudia I had worshiped from afar in distant New York state. I was embarrassed to have my ancient secret revealed, but it proved to be a nice way to begin a long friendship with Dorothy and her husband, photographer John Swope, whom I had met years before in my days at Life magazine.

She was undeniably a star, but like the best performers of any time, her goal was not the dubious rewards of stardom itself, but the quest of excellence in her craft. My teenage crush was not misplaced, nor the admiration I felt all of her days.