She was Jane for ten years and, in between, the best-bred girl in somebody else's picture: the sister, the friend, the one at the edge of the frame. She said she only tried to be natural. It is harder than it looks.
Fi1m perspective
Look at where Maureen O'Sullivan stands. In The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934) she is Henrietta, one of the sisters in the house Charles Laughton's father rules, while the film keeps its attention on Norma Shearer upstairs. In The Thin Man, the same year, she is Dorothy Wynant, one face in a crowded mystery. In Pride and Prejudice (1940) she is Jane Bennet, the sister who is not Elizabeth. MGM had her under contract from 1931 and used her as the well-bred young woman in support, and she did it gracefully enough that they saw no reason to stop.
And then there was Jane. From Tarzan the Ape Man (1932) she made six Tarzan films opposite Johnny Weissmuller over ten years, and it is the part the world kept asking her about until she was tired of the question. What she brought to it was manners and innocence at the same time, a girl from a good family who finds herself in the trees and does not make a fuss. She insisted the films were not quickies, and she is right that they were made with care. It is still a pity that a decade of decent supporting work in prestige pictures was filed behind a loincloth.
She stopped in 1942 to raise seven children with the director John Farrow, came back now and then from 1948, often in his films, and worked on Broadway and in television through the 1960s and 1970s. Then, in 1986, she was Norma in Hannah and Her Sisters, playing mother to her own daughter, Mia Farrow, and appeared the same year in Peggy Sue Got Married. We were moved by her in Hannah more than the film asks us to be. She has a few scenes and does not act in any of them, in the ordinary sense; she simply seems to belong to that family, and knowing who the daughter is gives the two of them a history Woody Allen did not have to write.
"I didn’t pretend to be an actress," she said that year. "I just tried to be natural, the best I could." Directors and co-stars said the same of her, that the delivery was plain and unmannered, and it is the reason the supporting parts hold up. It is also the reason she was so rarely given more than a supporting part. Naturalness reads as ease, and studios do not build pictures around ease.
Start with The Barretts of Wimpole Street and Hannah and Her Sisters, both of which we recommend, and go to the Tarzan films afterwards, when you know what she could do in a drawing room.
Biography
Maureen O'Sullivan was an Irish-American actress. Born in Boyle, County Roscommon, Ireland, on 17 May 1911, she was educated at convent schools in London and a finishing school in Paris. She made her screen debut in Song o' My Heart (1930) after being discovered by director Frank Borzage.
O'Sullivan became best known for playing Jane Parker opposite Johnny Weissmuller in six Tarzan films between 1932 and 1942. Her other notable screen roles include appearances in The Thin Man (1934), A Day at the Races (1937), Pride and Prejudice (1940) and The Big Clock (1948). She later returned to film in the 1980s, playing Norma in Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) and Elizabeth Alvorg in Peggy Sue Got Married (1986). She also worked extensively in theatre, including on Broadway.
She was married to director John Farrow from 1936 until his death in 1963; they had seven children, including actress Mia Farrow. O'Sullivan became a US citizen in 1947 and died on 23 June 1998 in Scottsdale, Arizona.
