Beulah Bondi

Some people are just destined to play the elderly. Now, we know people aged differently in the past. But Beulah Bondi was roughly my age when she played the destitute old woman shuffled from one child to another in Leo McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow. She was also wearing makeup to make her look older, as was her costar Victor Moore, but the fact that she was cast in the role at all is a little odd. After all, goodness knows there were plenty of actually elderly actresses running about Hollywood in the ‘30s.

Goodness also knows it isn’t as though Beulah Bondi wasn’t good in the role. She was beyond good; she was wonderful. She and Moore were iconic. No, it’s not where most people think of her first, but let’s be real. After as many years as most of us have had of seeing her every Christmas, it takes a lot to overcome our mental patterns. There are a handful of people we’ll just always see in our minds acting out the redemption of George Bailey, over and over. (I’ve gotten to surprisingly few of them; more are on the schedule now!) It doesn’t matter how incandescent she was as Ma Cooper; she’s still Ma Bailey to us.

And the “ma” thing certainly did keep happening. She played at least ten characters called some variation of “Ma” or “Grandma,” plus at least three Aunt Somebody characters. There was just something about her. She was single and childless—a choice she apparently made on behalf of her career, based on what she said to other people. She said it was a hard but necessary choice. She didn’t regret it. Interestingly, I’m not sure her name has ever come up in the gossip trails I follow for my June articles in search of hard evidence. You’d think it would have, because she was single in the Golden Age of Hollywood.

Certainly Capra saw something in her. They only collaborated twice, on Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It’s a Wonderful Life, though it feels as though it should be more. That appears to be it, though; her career actually survived in decent shape much longer than his. She would play James Stewart’s mother four times, including those two Capra films. She wanted to play Ma Joad and even took an old car to visit the camps of migrant farmworkers in preparation for the role. She would later call losing the role the greatest regret of her career.

But she kept going. Her final acting role was on The Waltons the month I was born. She won an Emmy, because she was still a phenomenal actress. Not, um, that I’ve ever actually watched The Waltons. But I can’t imagine she was any worse then than she had been forty years earlier. And forty years earlier, she’d been one of the best parts of a classic. Several classics. She’s in the National Film Registry three times—those Capras and of course Make Way for Tomorrow—but I’d be shocked if more of them aren’t on their way there.