Barbara O'Neil spent a career playing mothers and matriarchs, most of them older than she was, two ways: with a stillness that steadied the house, or a temper that took it over. She was never the lead; she was what the leads pushed against.
Fi1m perspective
Barbara O'Neil was twenty-nine when she played Scarlett O'Hara's mother, and she did it by doing very little. Ellen O'Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939) is the still centre of a household about to fall apart, and O'Neil plays her as the kind of authority that never raises its voice because it has never needed to. The film belongs to Vivien Leigh, as our review says, and it is the better for having one woman in it who is not trying to get anything. That was O'Neil's trade for thirty years: the mother, the matriarch, the woman at the head of the table.
She came to films from the stage. Summer stock with the University Players on Cape Cod, Broadway from 1932, then Stella Dallas (1937), her first film, as Helen Morrison. Within three years she was in two of the largest productions Hollywood had going, and then the leads never came. She worked steadily in supporting parts through the 1940s and 1950s, including I Remember Mama (1948) and The Nun's Story (1959) and two films for Otto Preminger, and made her last screen appearance in 1970. It is the shape of a career the studios found useful rather than one they built anything around.
The stillness was one setting; there was another. In All This, and Heaven Too (1940) she plays the Duchesse de Praslin opposite Bette Davis, and while Davis is unusually quiet, O'Neil does the shouting for everyone. The film runs 141 minutes and spends about a third of them waiting, and we noticed that we stopped waiting whenever O'Neil came in, because she was the only person on screen who seemed to want the plot to hurry up. It is a jealous, domineering part and she plays it without asking us to like her, which is rarer in a 1940 studio picture than it should be. We gave the film a 64; her scenes are not why it is low.
What she was not asked to do was carry a film. The nearest anyone comes to a criticism of her is that the leading parts stopped coming, which is a criticism of the studios more than of her. She had the training for more: Sarah Lawrence, Yale's drama school and the Players are the background of someone who expected to originate roles, and on Broadway she did. For the sofa, Gone with the Wind is the one to see her in, though you will have to look for her, and All This, and Heaven Too is the one where you will not. Actresses who play mothers at twenty-nine are usually still playing them at fifty, and O'Neil was.
Biography
Barbara O'Neil was an American stage and film actress. She was born in St Louis, Missouri, on 17 July 1910 and died in Cos Cob, Connecticut, on 3 September 1980. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College and studied acting at the Yale School of Drama before performing with the University Players summer stock company.
O'Neil made her screen debut in Stella Dallas (1937). She played Ellen O'Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939) and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her role as the Duchesse de Praslin in All This, and Heaven Too (1940). Her other films include Tower of London (1939), Secret Beyond the Door (1947), I Remember Mama (1948), Whirlpool (1950), Angel Face (1953) and The Nun's Story (1959). She was briefly married to writer and director Joshua Logan.
