Actors - Margaret Lindsay

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	Actors - Margaret Lindsay

Margaret Lindsay (September 19, 1910 - May 9, 1981) was an American film actress with 88 film credits, the most significant of which occurred during her time as a Warner Bros. contract player during the 1930s era of James Cagney, Bette Davis and Paul Muni.

Her career was noted for her supporting work in successful films of the 1930s and 1940s such as Jezebel
(1938) and Scarlet Street
(1945) and her leading roles in lower-budgeted B-movie films such as the Ellery Queen series at Columbia in the early 1940s.

Critics regard her portrayal of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Hepzibah Pyncheon in the 1940 film adaptation of The House of the Seven Gables as Lindsay's standout career role.

Background

Margaret Lindsay was born Margaret Kies in 1910 in the Mississippi River city of Dubuque, Iowa. She was the oldest of five children of a pharmacist father who died in 1930 before her Hollywood career began. According to Tom Longden of the Des Moines Register, "Peg" was "a tomboy who liked to climb pear trees" and was a "roller-skating fiend" whose favorite spot was the circular sidewalk at Dubuque's Visitation Convent. She was a 1930 graduate of Dubuque's Visitation Academy, an image of which can be found

Career

1930s

After attending the National Park Seminary in Washington, D.C., Lindsay convinced her parents to enroll her at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. She then went abroad to England to make her stage debut where she appeared in plays such as "Escape," "Death Takes a Holiday," and "The Romantic Age".

Lindsay was often mistaken as being British due to her convincing ability with an English accent, which impressed Universal Studios enough to sign her for their 1932 version of The Old Dark House.

As authors James Robert Parish and William T. Leonard wrote in Hollywood Players: The Thirties (Arlington House, 1976), Lindsay returned to America and arrived in Hollywood to discover that Gloria Stuart had actually been cast in her role in the film.

After some minor roles, she rebounded by being cast in the Fox Film Corporation's award-winning Cavalcade. Lindsay was chosen for the small but memorable role of Edith Harris, a doomed English bride whose honeymoon voyage takes place on the Titanic, which, remarkably ironically, would be Lindsay's competitor, Gloria Stuart's, claim to fame after appearing in the movie Titanic
as a 101 year old survivor. Stuart won some awards and was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar and was thought likely to win, but lost to Kim Basinger).

Lindsay won the role by backing up her convincing British accent with an elaborate "biography" that claimed she was born in a London suburb, the daughter of a London broker who sent her to a London convent where she was educated.

"Although I looked and talked English", she later explained, "to tell them I was actually from Iowa would have lost the assignment for me."

Her work in Cavalcade won her a contract at Warner Bros. where she became a reliable supporting player at the studio, working with actors such as Paul Muni, Errol Flynn, Henry Fonda, Warren William, Leslie Howard, George Arliss, Humphrey Bogart, Boris Karloff and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.

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Actors - Margaret Lindsay

Background

Career

1930s

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