Ann Sheridan

So the “Oomph Girl.” It is frankly a dire name. Maybe it’s because I’m not a young man in the late 1930s or early 1940s. Still, I can’t imagine attaching any kind of fondness to a woman forced by the studio to use it. The studio system had a lot to answer for, and this sort of thing doesn’t even make the top ten, but it’s hard to blame Ann Sheridan for hating the nickname. Her contract also made her go to nightclubs three times a week so she could be seen as a “girl about town,” and that’s not great, either.

Sheridan grew up a tomboy in Texas and was planning to become a teacher, but her sister sent a picture of her in a bathing suit to the Paramount Studios “Search for Beauty” contest. She won, and she got a screen test and a bit part in Wagon Wheels, starring Randolph Scott and Gail Patrick. At least according to IMDb; Wikipedia says it was, in fact, Search for Beauty, starring Buster Crabbe and Ida Lupino, which frankly makes more sense. She’s also listed as having been in the short “Hollywood on Parade No. A-6,” a newsreel of Paramount stars and her first documented appearance.

In 1935, Clara Lou Sheridan was named Ann by the studio instead. She was never a huge star, but she worked steadily. She sang and danced, and eventually Paramount declined to renew her contract, and she moved to Warner Bros. She was a popular pin-up, and Rex Harrison spoke positively of her appearance and talent. She made a couple of movies with Humphrey Bogart, in one of which they played siblings, and they referred to one another as brother and sister from that point on.

She’s one of those people who worked with enormous numbers of people more famous than she; possibly her best-remembered role is in The Man Who Came to Dinner, with Bette Davis, and of course she made multiple movies with Bogart. She was in I Was a Male War Bride with Cary Grant, and she was in the Oscar-nominated Kings Row with, sigh, Ronald Reagan. She was James Cagney’s love interest in Angels With Dirty Faces and was in an Errol Flynn-Olivia de Havilland Western, presumably as The Person Who Belonged In A Western.

Appallingly, one of the biographies of her on IMDb says that “she was aging—as was sadly evident in her last film.” Perhaps she wasn’t pinup lovely anymore, but there was still character in her face. And even that aside, she could still act. Which, theoretically, is the job of an actress. True, she couldn’t exactly play the ingenue anymore. But there should have been more roles for a talented actress even if she wasn’t young anymore. Actually, there was; she was making the TV show Pistols ‘n’ Petticoats when she died of esophageal cancer. Maybe the roles weren’t there as they should have been, but there were at least some.