By Ed Garea
Edited by Steve Herte
Theresa Harris had
everything necessary to achieve stardom in Hollywood. She was gorgeous with a
great pair of legs. She was a talented singer and dancer. She was also an actress,
stage-trained. So, how come with all this going for her, did she ever miss out
on superstardom in Hollywood?
The answer is simple:
Theresa Harris was Black. Out of 84 screen and television appearances, she
played a maid in 40 of them. That’s almost 50%. And many of her screen
appearances were un-credited, including one in which she played an influential
role.
This was not an anomaly:
to be a Black performer in a lily-White industry meant accepting the sort of
roles that couldn’t even be designated as supporting; in a sense, these were
supporting roles to supporting players. There were many talented
African-American actors in movies and it was extremely rare if any had a
substantial part in a feature film. Roles like Dooley Wilson’s Sam in Casablanca were the glaring exception rather than the rule. If they
weren’t playing maids or butlers, they were assigned the role of the Ignorant
Darkie, playing the comic relief in a drama and heightening a comedy.
She was born on New
Year’s Eve, 1906, in Houston to former sharecroppers Isaiah and Mabel Harris.
Isaiah worked in construction while Mabel worked as a dramatic reader and
taught school. The family moved to Southern California in the early 1920s where
Theresa pursued music, graduating with scholastic honors from Jefferson High
School and later from USC’s Conservatory of Music and Zoellner’s Conservatory
of Music. She was bitten hard by the acting bug while in college, and after
graduation, began appearing in local stage productions, eventually playing the
lead role in the Lafayette Players’ production of Irene. It was only a short
walk to Hollywood.
Her first role was an
un-credited one as a singer in a Black nightclub in Paramount’s gangster opus, Thunderbolt, starring Harold Arlen,
George Bancroft and Fay Wray. Although her scene was a short one, it was enough
to garner notice from critics and audience like. She began looking for more
work in films. The size of the role and the crediting was unimportant – getting
experience was the goal. She appeared in Morocco as a camp
follower and Arrowsmith as a native mother. But roles were
un-credited. After that, she played a succession of maids. She was Thelma
Todd’s maid, Laura, in the 1932 Marx Brothers comedy, Horsefeathers,
but if you blinked, you missed her.
Her first credited role
was as the Maid in the Little Rascals 1932 short Free Wheeling.
After two more un-credited roles in Night After Night, with George
Raft and Mae West, and The Half Naked Truth with Lupe Velez
and Lee Tracy, Harris decided to move to Broadway, where she met greater
success, but the lure of Hollywood proved too strong.
She continued to enjoy
steady work from the 30s to the 50s, though rarely playing anything more than a
maid, ladies’ room attendant, or a face in the crowd. (Perhaps her best known
maid’s role was that of Zette,
Bette Davis’s maid in 1938’s Jezebel.) Her last film was in 1958,
the Gift of Love, playing the wife of one the lesser characters –
unbilled, as usual.
Harris was as smart as
she was beautiful. She wisely invested her film earnings, and being married to
a physician, was able to retire to a financially secure life. She died at her
home in Inglewood on October 8, 1985, from natural causes and was buried in
Angelus Rosedale Cemetery in Los Angeles, California.
Were she born in, say,
the ‘70s, her career path would have been very different. Still, when Harris
was allowed a decent part, she more than acquitted herself. Following are the
handful of movies where she did make a difference.
Professional Sweetheart (RKO, 1933): Harris has an unbilled role as Ginger Rogers’s maid. Rogers plays a radio singer who is the spokeswoman for Ippsie-Wippsie Washcloths – a role that requires her to live a pure life offstage. But she wants to smoke, drink and sow her wild oats. Harris helps Rogers along in this quest by teaching her to sing in a blues style. Near the end Rogers’s pursuer, Speed (Frank McHugh), hires Vera to sing in an effort to win Rogers back. Harris gets a chance to show off her singing voice and gets a chance to do more than sweep, dust and tell Missy how great she looks in that new dress. Still, she’s unbilled.
Baby Face (WB, 1933): This is the movie most fans talk about when
discussing Harris. Baby Face is an amazing movie, especially
for its time. It’s the movie that pushed the Pre-Code envelope to its breaking
point and ultimately led to stricter censorship. It also cost Darryl Zanuck his
job at Warner Brothers as Head of Production, as it intensified a long-standing
rift between him and Harry Warner, and thus, Warner offered no resistance when
Zanuck announced he was fed up and quit to form Twentieth Century Pictures.
Baby Face is concerned with the fortunes of Lily Powers (Barbara Stanwyck,
who rises from being pimped out by her own father in his speakeasy (located in
an unnamed industrial city) to reach the heights in New York as a rich
courtesan of sorts. Harris is Chico,
Lily’s best friend and co-conspirator in her rise from the bottom to the top.
Early on in the movie, the lines of demarcation are drawn between Lily and her
father. Dad wants to fire Chico because she breaks too many dishes, but Lily
tells him that if Chico goes, then she goes with her. And, as she’s the main
attraction at the speakeasy, Dad relents. We see that not only are Lily and
Chico friends, but also friends on an equal footing. (Possibly lovers as well?)
Armed with the advice of
her only real male friend, a bookseller who teaches Lily the philosophy of
Nietzsche, Lily sets off with Chico after Dad is killed when his still blows
up. Hitching a ride on a freight train, they are caught by the conductor, but
Lily offers him “fare in kind.” Chico simply turns her back and sings “St.
Louis Blues” as we know what’s going to occur next. As Lily lands a job in New
York and begins her climb, Chico is right there. Because she cannot exist
openly as an equal, she assumes the position of Lily’s maid. But we are wise to
her real role as friend and co-conniver. Besides, what maid walks around in a
fur collar?
Baby Face proved that Harris could do more than
answer doors or serve coffee. But, times being what they were, that would be
her most lucrative roles, unfortunately.
Buck Benny Rides Again (Paramount, 1940): This is a slight, but
funny, comedy
about Jack Benny’s
attempts to make Ellen Drew believe that he’s a real cowboy. Harris has a
small, but decent role and gets to interact with Eddie Anderson, as Rochester, who (as usual) ends up
stealing the movie.
The Flame of New Orleans (Universal, 1941): The first American film
from exiled French director Rene Clair (fleeing the Germans after France fell
in 1940). Again, Harris is a maid. But this film is more in the mold of Baby
Face, as Harris is more than a maid to courtesan Marlene Dietrich, who is
posing as a society woman and juggling two rich men, a banker and a sea captain
against one another. Harris basically reprises Chico in this film, but has many
more lines and Clair provides her with some real glamour shots, which reveal
her natural beauty. It may well have been that her role was a major factor in
the censors demanding large cuts in the film before it would be allowed to be
released.
I Walked with a Zombie (RKO, 1943): This was Harris’ second film
for producer Val Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur. Both had reportedly
been impressed with her small, unbilled role in Cat People and
offered her a role in this film. Again she played a maid, but the character is
well developed and she has some good scenes with star Anna Lee. In fact, this
might be her biggest part in a well-known film. Tourneur also spends time
highlighting Harris’s beautiful face and animated expressions as she comes face
to face with the undead. Despite the subject matter, which may not appeal to
all, this is a film to watch to see Harris’s beauty and acting talent.
Out of the Past (RKO, 1947): In an unbilled part, Harris
only has one scene in this classic noir, but director Jacques Tourneur knew she
could do much with a very small part. She plays Eunice Leonard, Jane Greer’s former maid and has a dandy little
scene with Robert Mitchum in the nightclub scene when Mitchum tries to find out
where Greer has gone. Again, though a small part and only one scene, the role
is important in moving the plot along and Harris acquits herself well.
Theresa
Harris is a perfect example of how sheer perseverance can get one through a hostile
universe. Though she would never get the chance to become a major movie star,
her performances never give that fact away. Imagine what she could have done
today.
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