A Winters tale

GF: How did you get the part in A Double Life [1947], the picture that was your breakthrough?

SW: It was kind of an accident. Harry Cohn dropped me. Then I sort of ran in and out of silly pictures - you know, doing one-day parts. I had just signed to do Oklahoma! in its eighth year on Broadway, when George Cukor had me test for A Double Life. I was sure Lana Turner was going to get it, but I was very lucky. When Cukor told me I had the role, he said, "Get yourself an agent. You don't have to sign one of those contracts with this company." But Universal was offering me two thousand dollars a week, more money than I had ever heard of, and I stayed with them from '48 to '55 - seven years in which I made thirty-five movies, sometimes two at the same time. I was playing bad blonde bimbos, usually up against the sweet brunette. They had me do things like Johnny Stool Pigeon [1949] and Playgirl [1954]; I didn't see a lot of them, so I don't know what they were like. I began doing theater anywhere. I did The Taming of the Shrew all over Southern California in school auditoriums, and I worked as a singing waitress at a club called the Serenade in Hollywood.

GF: Just before that, you had a tiny part as one of the wagon-train gals in Read River [1948].

SW: I danced with Monty Clift in it. I just smiled and flirted, and we talked a mile a minute while we were doing it - I did, anyway. When the scene was over, he said, "Maybe we'll have a real chance to work together sometime, Shelley."

GF: And, of course, you did - in one of your greatest films, A Place in the Sun. Tell me about working with him.

SW: There was an internal thing that happened with Monty that the camera got. One of [director] George Stevens's tricks was to have us rehearse with the dialogue, and then do the scene and not say anything - just think about that. He always felt that sound ruined film, and maybe he was right. I've been very lucky with my directors. I had Cukor, Stevens, Roman Polanski, Stanley Kubrick, and Robert Wise. That's the best school you could go to.

GF: When were you aware that you were developing real technique as an actor?

SW: Around 1950, I think I began to realize that when I had a good director I could be quite good. But I didn't have the technique to create a role - I mean, in a literal way. Luckily, [Elia] Kazan had seen A Double Life, and he invited me to be an observer at the Actors Studio in New York. I remained an observer until I did A Hatful of Rain on Broadway, in 1955, with Ben Gazzara and Tony Franciosa [later her third husband]. It was the first play about drugs, and I did a lot of research.

GF: You were away from films for four years and during that time became very involved with the Actors Studio. Did studying the Method change your life?

SW: I think so. It gave me a surer grounding in what I was doing. I would know how to come to a result that I would have previously hit upon accidentally, or if I had a very good director. That's what the Method teaches - preparation. But the real teacher is the live audience. I am so moved by what happens in a theater. It's the greatest drug there is; you don't get it anyplace else. There's a wonderful silence that you hear, if that's possible. When I was doing A Hatful of Rain, there came a very quiet moment in the play when I'd realize my husband's a drug addict. I got very upset because I would hear a clicking sound every time. Finally, I called the stage manager into my dressing room and said, "Somebody is opening one of the fire doors right at that moment, every night." He said, "Oh, that can't be, but I'll go out and watch." He came back after the show and said, "Shelley, when your hear that, don't worry - it's fifteen-hundred women opening their purses and reaching for their handkerchiefs."