Margaret Brooke Sullavan (May 16, 1909 – January 1, 1960) was an Academy Award-nominated American actress.
Sullavan was born in Norfolk, Virginia, the daughter of a wealthy stockbroker, Cornelius Sullavan and his wife Garland Brooke. She attended boarding school at Chatham Episcopal Institute (now Chatham Hall), where she was president of the student body and delivered the salutory oration in 1927. She moved to Boston and lived with her half-sister, Weedie, and where she became involved with the Harvard Dramatic Club. She debuted in the undergraduate musical Close Up in 1929. Another member of the cast was Henry Fonda. Charlie Leatherbee and Joshua Logan were in the audience and invited her to join them in Falmouth, Massachusetts to be in the University Players.
She appeared as Goldina opposite Fonda in the first production of their second summer stock season in 1929, The Devil in the Cheese, her debut on the professional stage. Also in that cast were Logan and Kent Smith; its director was Bretaigne Windust. Eventually she was cast by Lee Shubert in her first Broadway play, A Modern Virgin (1931).
from The Shining Hour (1938)
Sullavan arrived in Hollywood on May 16, 1933, her 24th birthday. Her film debut came that same year in Only Yesterday. She received her sole Oscar nomination, as Best Actress, for the World War I-era romance Three Comrades (1938). She co-starred in four films with James Stewart, with whom she and Fonda had acted in a stock company when they were all unknowns: Next Time We Love (1936), The Shopworn Angel (1938), The Mortal Storm (1940) and The Shop Around the Corner (1940). Other major films during this period include Little Man, What Now? (1934), The Good Fairy (1935, directed by Wyler), The Shining Hour (1938, with Joan Crawford), So Ends Our Night, Back Street, Appointment for Love (all 1941) and Cry 'Havoc' (1943).
Margaret Sullavan was also one of the many actresses optioned for the role of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With The Wind (1939), however she (along with Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins) fell out of lead in the auditions making way for Paulette Goddard and Vivien Leigh. Leigh would later go on to play Scarlett in the film which earned her the first of two Best Actress Oscars.
Her last screen performance was in the film No Sad Songs for Me (1950), directed by Rudolph Maté and written by Howard Koch. She came out of retirement in 1952 to appear in Terence Rattigan's drama The Deep Blue Sea on Broadway, followed the next year by the Broadway premiere of Samuel A. Taylor's comedy Sabrina Fair. She also appeared on television in Chevrolet Tele-Theater, Studio One, Magnavox Theater, and Schlitz Playhouse of Stars.
She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1751 Vine Street.
Sullavan was married four times. She married Henry Fonda on December 25, 1931 in Baltimore, Maryland, while both were performing with the University Players in its 18-week winter season there. The marriage ended the following year, although Sullavan and "Hank" remained lifelong friends. Her next marriage, to director William Wyler, was equally brief. Her third marriage, to agent and producer Leland Hayward, lasted eleven years and produced three children: Brooke, born July 5, 1937; Bridget, born 1939; and William Leland, born 1941. William, a lawyer and producer whose best-known films include Easy Rider and Haywire, a television movie based on a memoir by his sister Brooke about their charmed, tragic Hollywood family, was found dead of a gunshot wound to the heart on March 9, 2008 at his home in Castaic, California. He was 66. The death was ruled a suicide.
Sullavan and Hayward divorced in 1947, and three years later she married Kenneth Wagg, an English investment banker, to whom she was married at the time of her death.
Sullavan suffered from depression and a congenital hearing defect in her left ear called otosclerosis that worsened as she aged, making her more and more hard of hearing. On January 1, 1960, she was found dead in a hotel room in New Haven, Connecticut, having succumbed to a deliberate overdose of barbiturates at the age of 50. (Her daughter Bridget died nine months later from an overdose.)
Her daughter, actress Brooke Hayward, wrote Haywire, a memoir about her family. It was made into a television movie starring Lee Remick.
"Most actors are basically neurotic people. Terribly, terribly unhappy. That's one of the reasons they become actors. Nobody well adjusted would ever want to expose himself or herself to a large group of strangers. Think of it. Insanity! Generally, by their very nature - that is if they're at all dedicated - actors do not make good parents. They are altogether egotistical and selfish. The better the actor - and I hate to say it, the bigger the star - why, the more that seems to be true. Honestly, I don't think I've ever known one - not one! - star who was successfully able to combine a career and family life." - Margaret Sullavan
