
“A true artist” Cukor called Judy Holliday. “She could interpret a text with the subtlest detail.” Their creative relationship brought out the qualities that made her a new kind of star for the postwar period, luminous and witty and conveying an extraordinary range while playing “ordinary” women instead of conventional glamour queens. They made five movies together in her all-too-brief Hollywood career, including this one, the 1954 romantic comedy It Should Happen to You. (Columbia Pictures; Photofest.)
An excerpt adapted from the critical study George Cukor’s People: Acting for a Master Director (Columbia University Press, 2024).
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One of the highlights of Adam’s Rib is the Judy Holliday “screen test” inserted into that 1949 MGM movie by Katharine Hepburn and director George Cukor as a plot to persuade Harry Cohn of Columbia Pictures to cast Holliday in Born Yesterday. Holliday was still starring in that hit play by Garson Kanin (which debuted on Broadway in 1946) while filming Adam’s Rib. She was captivating audiences as the ignorant and ditzy but unexpectedly shrewd Billie Dawn, the mistress of a coarse junk dealer visiting Washington, D.C., to make a corrupt deal. But Cohn was refusing to cast her in the film version, responding to the idea with, “That fat Jewish broad?”
Cukor had appreciated Holliday’s unusual talent since she played a small dramatic role as one of the wives in a San Francisco hotel room watching their husbands fly off to war at dawn in his film Winged Victory (1944). That is the best scene in an otherwise impersonal semidocumentary feature written by Moss Hart, an overwhelmingly male wartime morale-booster Cukor directed for the U.S. Army Air Forces and Twentieth Century-Fox. Holliday plays Ruth Miller, a woman from Brooklyn married to the average-guy character played by Edmond O’Brien. She touches the heart in an understated, authentic way, with no sentimentality but an honest foreboding of loss and grief.
In Adam’s Rib, an original screenplay by the married screenwriters Ruth Gordon and Kanin, Hepburn’s character, the feminist lawyer Amanda Bonner, serves as a public defender for Holliday’s Doris Attinger, who has shot but not killed her philandering husband (Tom Ewell). Amanda relishes the challenge of turning the case into a feminist courtroom battle with her own husband, assistant district attorney Adam Bonner (Spencer Tracy), to prove a point about how women aren’t allowed to get away with the same kind of retaliation for which men were often granted a pass in the sexist legal system. Hepburn had the idea of filming Amanda’s five-minute jailhouse interview with Doris in an unbroken long take to show off Holliday’s acting skills.

This long take in Adam’s Rib was part of a scheme concocted by Hepburn to convince Columbia’s Harry Cohn to let Judy Holliday play her acclaimed stage role of Billie Dawn from Kanin’s play Born Yesterday in Cukor’s upcoming film version. The uncouth Cohn, who had scorned Holliday as a “fat Jewish broad,” was won over by Cukor’s filming of this comical scene of Hepburn’s attorney interrogating her client about her shooting her husband. Hepburn and Cukor gave Holliday the best angle while the star and her regular stand-in, Eve March, were less prominently placed. (Frame enlargement; MGM.)
Cukor eagerly agreed and placed the lawyer and client at a table with Hepburn in self-effacing profile at the left of the frame and Holliday sitting sideways, her face seen more fully, twisting a handkerchief as she talks. Eve March, Hepburn’s longtime friend and lookalike stand-in, plays Amanda’s secretary, partly visible as she takes notes in side view at the far right. That gives the scene a subtle mirror effort while still keeping the audience’s focus on Holliday. When Amanda calls the shooting of Doris’s husband an accident, she guilelessly replies, “Oh, no accident – I wanted to shoot ’im.” Amanda cautions, “Suppose we decide later just what you wanted to do.” Asked when she decided to shoot her husband, she says, “I didn’t decide nothin’ – I was doin’ everything like in a dream. Like I was watchin’ myself but I couldn’t help it. It was like a dream.”
Holliday is hilariously deadpan and self-incriminating as Hepburn, throwing the entire scene to her, questions her softly, trying her lawyerly best to coax Doris into being a bit more cagey. This rather dumb but victimized woman is showing how incapable she is of protecting herself in a hostile legal system unless she has a sympathetic and scheming female lawyer directing her behavior. Like all of Holliday’s acting, the scene is a mixture of wide-eyed comic ingenuousness and unexpected poignancy; a highly intelligent woman, she often played against her own personality with complex effectiveness.
When Cohn saw the long take of Holliday’s interrogation, it finally convinced him to cast her in Born Yesterday. She won the best-actress Oscar over formidable veteran competition, Gloria Swanson in Sunset Blvd. and Bette Davis in All About Eve – the two may have canceled each other out. Holliday went on to star in two more movies for Cukor, The Marrying Kind (1952) and It Should Happen to You (1954), becoming one of his quintessential stars and most simpatico actresses.

Cukor had the unprecedented distinction of winning an award from the Writers Guild of America, West, for the respect he showed for writers. Here he confers on the set of A Double Life (1947) with his frequent screenwriting collaborators Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin and the film’s star, Ronald Colman, who won an Oscar for playing an actor obsessed with his role as Shakespeare’s Othello. (Universal-International/Photofest.)
Guiding established stars such as Tracy and Hepburn into the radically changed postwar filmmaking environment was one part of a leading director’s job. Discovering and developing new stars who fit that zeitgeist was another. From the beginning of Cukor’s career in Hollywood, he had always proved unusually skillful at both tasks. So Cukor was ideally suited to help launch the accomplished but unconventional Judy Holliday as a popular leading lady of the 1950s. She was a fresh new kind of star in postwar Hollywood, a pretty and charming but realistically deglamorized leading lady who could handle comedy as well as drama with aplomb and blended both with offbeat originality.
And this young actress from the New York stage was unabashedly Jewish in an industry that had usually been skittish about allowing Jewish stars to assert their ethnic identity onscreen. Audience expectations for films changed after World War II, with more extensive use of location shooting as well as more stories about ordinary people with actors who were not always expected to be conventionally beautiful. The Italian neorealist movement influenced Hollywood and led to shooting in the streets of New York and other locations with gritty films about working-class characters. Actors felt freer to present themselves candidly, without disguising or distorting their identities. Previously, there had been relatively few overtly Jewish stars (Eddie Cantor, John Garfield, Sylva Sidney, Danny Kaye, and the Marx Bros. among them); other Jewish stars (such as Theda Bara, Edward G. Robinson, Paulette Goddard, Melvyn Douglas, and Lauren Bacall) had often passed for Gentile.
Holliday was born Judith Tuvim in New York City but had to change her last name when she went to Hollywood, deriving her new one from “yom tovim,” Hebrew for holiday. Judy’s first job as a teenager had been working as an assistant switchboard operator and receptionist for the Mercury Theatre, run by Orson Welles and John Houseman; it’s speculated, but hasn’t been proven, that she was an extra in Too Much Johnson, Welles’s uncompleted 1938 silent film. She went to Hollywood in the early 1940s as a member of a nightclub act to appear in movies. She had an androgynous look, highly feminine yet with a stocky build and a somewhat mannish short hairstyle, and Hollywood found it difficult at first to fit her into established modes.
Even though Holliday had been compelled to change her name, she benefited from the cultural advances due to the decline in anti-Semitic prejudice as a result of the war, and she was an unpredictable actress with a protean image the public loved. Her endearing persona and unusual acting range were embraced when Cukor brought her to screen stardom in her signature role as Billie Dawn.
Holliday had turned the dazzling part of the brassy but surprisingly savvy former showgirl into a personal triumph in more than 1,200 stage performances under Kanin’s direction. As her front-page obituary in the New York Times observed of her performance as Billie, “Where such a role was usually characterized merely by gum-chewing, sinuosity and unalloyed brassiness, she made it not only funny but also human and moving.” Paul Douglas played her brutish companion on Broadway, but Broderick Crawford took over the film role of Harry Brock; Crawford’s resemblance to Harry Cohn did not go unnoticed, even by Cohn, who seemed to relish that sly case of mirroring. The screenplay adaptation was written by Kanin without credit. Cukor had found that Albert Mannheimer’s adaptation and a rewrite by Julius and Philip Epstein still needed reworking, and Cohn wouldn’t pay any more on the script or give Kanin adaptation credit; so Mannheimer received sole screen credit and an Oscar nomination.

Judy Holliday’s brassy ex-showgirl Billie Dawn in Born Yesterday (1950), a role she originated in Garson Kanin’s stage play, has an intellectual side she brings out with the help of her Pygmalion figure, political journalist Paul Verrall (William Holden). Holliday won the Oscar for best actress in a field crowded with strong competition. (Frame enlargement; Columbia Pictures.)
Holliday’s Billie subverts audience expectations as her initially ditzy detachment from mundane reality gradually turns into focused ambition when she is tutored about politics while the ambitious Harry purchases a congressman. She is such a formidable character that she virtually controls the relationship with her Pygmalion figure (a liberal journalist played by William Holden) while simultaneously getting the upper hand on the domineering Harry, especially after he shockingly strikes her in the face. As happens with Hepburn in Cukor’s 1952 film of the Gordon-Kanin screenplay Pat and Mike, Billie eventually declares that she’s nobody’s to own, and her delight in her newfound learning manifests itself most cleverly when she forces Harry’s hesitating lawyer to explain some papers she is asked to sign, and she exclaims, “A cartel!”
Holliday’s Oscar for the film should have resulted in a steady succession of starring roles for her. But her film career in the wake of her Oscar was intermittent. She lost work when she ran afoul of the post-World War II Red Scare for her socialist family background and her casual leftist activities. She appeared in the infamous anticommunist pamphlet Red Channels (1950), which meant automatic blacklisting until a person managed to “clear” himself or herself. Holliday was cleared, nominally at least, after appearing in executive session before the U.S. Senate Internal Security Committee in March 1952. Despite her principled opposition to the witch hunt and her fervent desire before her testimony to avoid naming names, she acknowledged to the committee that a late uncle had been “a very radical Communist” before “he had a change of heart and became a rabid anti-Communist,” and when questioned about a woman she described as her “best friend” and asked whether her friend was involved “in any respect with your signatures and affiliations with these Communist-front organizations,” Holliday denied it but nervously blurted out, “I was told that she was a Communist.”
Even after that hesitant degree of cooperation with the committee, Holliday’s career was blighted by graylisting, partly because of further smearing in the press when her testimony was publicly released; she spent much of her subsequent career back on Broadway. Cohn, whose attitude toward blacklisting was flexible, remained mostly supportive, casting her in four more Columbia films after Cukor’s domestic drama The Marrying Kind, which had been released shortly before her testimony. She followed it with the lead in Cukor’s romantic comedy It Should Happen to You. But Holliday’s film career was less active than it should have been – she worked only once with another studio, MGM, in her last film, Vincente Minnelli’s 1960 version of the stage musical Bells Are Ringing, in which she had won a Tony Award – until her death from cancer at age forty-three in 1965.

During Cukor’s neorealist period, the New York-set It Should Happen to You, a satire of American success mania, gave Jack Lemmon his first film role. Drawing on his stars’ musical talent, Cukor let Lemmon and Holliday sing as he noodled on the piano in a seemingly impromptu scene that is part of the film’s casual charms. (Frame enlargement; Columbia Pictures.)
In its early, frolicky scenes, Born Yesterday established Holliday’s screen image as a zany comedian with a high-pitched, amusingly screechy voice, but even in that film she evolves into a more serious personality with an unexpected intelligence and aptitude for learning. The Marrying Kind, given its often somber subject matter and rollercoaster emotional impact, is a hard-to-categorize film and unsurprisingly was not the commercial success that Born Yesterday was. The tragicomic original screenplay by Gordon and Kanin is the story of an ordinary New York couple, Florence and Chet Keefer (Aldo Ray), who relate their troubles to a sympathetic family court judge (Madge Kennedy, a silent film actress friend of Cukor’s who hadn’t made a film since 1928 but was launched on a new career as a character actress by this role).
The Marrying Kind is a richer and more complex character study than the broad comedy mixed with pseudo-Capraesque political drama in Born Yesterday or the gimmicky satire of the modern cult of celebrity in Kanin’s original comedy It Should Happen to You, co-starring Jack Lemmon in his film debut. Although that film’s satirical point is on target, if not ahead of its time, anticipating Andy Warhol’s famous comment that “in the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes,” Kanin’s screenplay about the lovable goofball Gladys Glover, an out-of-work model who splurges her savings to put her name on a giant billboard to make herself famous, dispiritingly scolds Gladys for not being content with Cold War-era conformism.
The convincingly low-key performances by Holliday and Ray in The Marrying Kind, on the other hand, combine with extensive New York location work in a modest, affecting film that forms part of Cukor’s adventurous neorealist period, along with Adam’s Rib, It Should Happen to You, and The Model and the Marriage Broker (his 1951 charming and touching comedy-drama featuring Thelma Ritter). The novelty and freshness of these films advanced Cukor’s career stylistically while the old studio system that supported him was starting to crumble. And Holliday’s Florence Keefer in The Marrying Kind endures as her major performance for Cukor.
The Marrying Kind shows Cukor’s strengths in implying the impact of class issues and sociopolitical stresses on ordinary people without preachment or oversimplification. The marriage of Florence (Florrie) and Chet Keefer is constantly threatened by economic problems. They live in a quintessentially sterile and soulless modern housing development, Manhattan’s Peter Cooper Village, part of a massive and controversial project spearheaded by Robert Moses. And the Keefers never get ahead even though Chet dreams up get-rich-quick schemes that seem rigged to disappoint them. His job at the main post office sorting facility, though stable, is a dead end, and Cukor said he wanted to portray the setting as stale and claustrophobic and empty, if not hellish at least purgatorial (the film’s fantasy about the president of the U.S. paying Chet a visit in the post office, to ill effect, is clumsy). The couple’s apartment is drab and mostly unfurnished for quite a while before they get some depressing furniture. They never even get around to sleeping in a double bed, due to the continuing strictures of censorship, which Cukor deplored.
Joseph Walker’s cinematography is deliberately devoid of the romantic sheen he brought to twenty Capra movies, including It’s a Wonderful Life, which this film somewhat resembles in theme, along with other harshly realistic films of the period about the travails of ordinary couples. They include Vittorio De Sica’s Italian neorealist classic Bicycle Thieves (1948), as well as William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), Akira Kurosawa’s One Wonderful Sunday (1947), George Stevens’s A Place in the Sun (1951, based on Theodore Dreiser’s novel An American Tragedy), and the 1954 blacklisted film by Michael Wilson, Salt of the Earth.

The sequence of the boy drowning in The Marrying Kind (1952) starts with the family — including working-class parents Florrie and Chet Keefer (Judy Holliday and Aldo Ray) — enjoying a Decoration Day picnic before Joey (Barry Curtis) runs off. A blend of domestic comedy and harrowing drama, this film written by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin shows Cukor’s skill at turning from one mode of storytelling to another, giving his films the feeling of real life being lived. (Frame enlargement; Columbia Pictures.)
Perhaps the most deleterious effect of the Keefers’ marginal economic status is how it causes Chet to feel a constant sense of inadequacy as a man in the terms of the American system of that period, stemming from his perceived failure to succeed and provide a better life for his wife and two children. He angrily tries to convince Florence not to go back to work, because it makes him feel unmanly. When Florence gets a modest inheritance from a former employer, Chet can’t accept it, believing irrationally that she must have slept with the boss. The Keefers, though not stupid, are portrayed as inarticulate and limited in their understanding of their situation, though they at least try (unsuccessfully) to avoid blaming each other. The script and Cukor make some cleverly ironic points about marital disagreement by having the couple misdescribe to the judge in opposite ways their memories of their courtship and the early years of their marriage.
Aldo Ray, whose publicity buildup by Columbia included getting a special plug at the end of The Marrying Kind, was an untrained actor who had been discovered in an audition while serving as a constable in a small town in California. Cukor worked with him energetically, and he delivers a convincing enough performance as Chet, even if his scratchy voice and the character’s irascible, hardheaded ignorance seem somewhat off-putting. Ray was another of the new kind of quirky postwar Hollywood stars, but his promising career eventually fizzled as he became typecast in tough-guy roles and suffered from a drinking problem.
The screenplay of The Marrying Kind has been criticized for condescension toward the working class. But that seems more of an intermittent limitation in the writers’ approach than an outright insult, due to their attempting a darker, more detached view of the American Dream than usually seen on American screens. Gordon, Kanin, and Cukor show compassion toward their characters and keen insights into the couple’s malaise. Holliday’s sensitivity and the sense of nonintellectual intelligence with which she imbues Florence help make her role nuanced and non-stereotypical. Furthermore, the film thoughtfully critiques the usual Hollywood approach to portraying courtship and marriage in an unrealistically romantic manner. And as the title itself seems to suggest, this film portrays the Keefers as part of a separate category from that of the gay director and remains skeptical that their marriage will work out, even when they decide to give it another try at the end, after telling their tales of woe to the judge.
Most strikingly, the Keefers’ marriage is almost destroyed by their grief over the loss of a child. Americans generally try to evade feelings of grief, given social pressure for illusory “closure,” but this film unflinchingly shows the devastating impact of the grieving process, as have two other notable American films involving a couple whose child dies, King Vidor’s masterpiece The Crowd (1928) and George Stevens’s Penny Serenade (1941). The brilliantly directed sequence in The Marrying Kind of the drowning of their six-year-old son, Joey (Barry Curtis), at a Decoration Day picnic, is a haunting shock that reverses the mostly comic momentum of the film, and it is one of Cukor’s most powerful and memorable achievements. Earlier, the son’s name was mentioned by Florrie in a flat, affectless tone to the judge, “We told you about Joey, didn’t we? Our boy?” In retrospect that line and her way of delivering it seem eerily expressive of her deadened emotional state.
The fatal sequence begins, like so many unexpected catastrophes, in a breezy, casual manner. The Keefers are sitting and reclining on a blanket in a park near a lake, seen in the near distance behind them, as Florence has another futile get-rich inspiration (flavored postage stamps). She cheerfully strums a ukelele and warbles a romantic song (“Dolores” by Frank Loesser and Louis Alter) in Holliday’s sweetly captivating singing voice (the song is a subtle premonition: Dolores, derived from the Latin dolor, is a Spanish name that means pain, sorrow, or grief). Joey runs off with friends to go swimming, Florence shouting a brief, almost subconscious warning to go only to the edge, since he just ate.
As she sings with blissful obliviousness (“How I love the kisses of Dolores/ . . . I would die to be with my Dolores”), we see the feet of people moving back and forth behind them, without seeing the rest of their bodies, until the pace accelerates of more and more feet running mostly in a leftward direction toward the lake. Just after Florence sings the line about death, a man’s voice calls out, “Where’s the mother?,” and Cukor cuts to a wide shot showing the lake. But the Keefers don’t notice until a boy runs up, pointing and shouting incoherently that their son, Joey, is “in the water.” With stunning force, Cukor follows Chet in a tracking shot as he runs toward the lake through tall rushes and uses a whip pan to show him plunging into the water as another man carries Joey’s lifeless body out of the lake. Chet lifts him to the grass and frantically tries to revive him with Florence’s help. Cukor said he knew that Ray had been a U.S. Navy frogman in World War II, which made his actions seem more violent and desperate.
The sequence abruptly dissolves to a long take of sustained emotion as Florence breaks down and collapses her head onto her arm on the table in the judge’s office, helplessly pounding her fist as the judge tries to console her; Chet also breaks into tears, going to a window and turning his back to the camera. This series of images is a devastatingly effective cinematic depiction of the helpless, inconsolable agony of grief and the irrational guilt that often afflicts a couple who have lost a child. “I don’t know how we lived through it,” Florence tells the judge, incongruously smiling and laughing as people sometimes do in moments of uncontrollable emotion. “Maybe we didn’t.” Discussing the tentative ending of the film when the couple reconciles in a shadowy room in the courthouse, Gavin Lambert told Cukor in their 1972 interview book, On Cukor, “On the surface it looks conventionally happy. . . . But you can’t help feeling they’re going back to a kind of hell.” Cukor “emphatically” responded, “Yes, yes! If you believe the picture up to then, it’s the only way it can hit you.”
Cukor’s masterful control of tone in his multifaceted films – enabling him to slip effortlessly from comedy to drama, sometimes to farce and occasional fantasy, to stark tragedy and back around again to comedy – gives them a richly textured sense of life being lived. Never was this skill more pronounced in his work than in The Marrying Kind, his penetrating and empathetic look into the dilemmas of an ordinary American working-class couple. In that process no actor served Cukor better than the subtly mercurial Judy Holliday. Cukor defined for Lambert the actress’s unique qualities:
Like all the great clowns, Judy Holliday could also move you. She made you laugh, she was a supreme technician, and then suddenly you were touched. She could interpret a text with the subtlest detail, her pauses would give you every comma – she’d even give the author a semicolon if he’d written one. And vocally she was fascinating, she had a way of hitting the note like a bull’s-eye, and the slightest distortion in the recording meant that you lost something. If you lost any of the highs you lost a moment of comedy, and if you lost any of the lows you lost a moment of emotion. A true artist.
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NOTES ON SOURCES
Judy Holliday’s background and work with George Cukor: Will Holtzman, Judy Holliday: A Biography (Putnam, 1982); Holliday obituary, “Judy Holliday, 42 [sic: 43], Is Dead of Cancer,” New York Times, June 8, 1965; Holliday working for the Mercury Theatre: Patrick McGilligan, Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (HarperCollins, 2015). Cukor to Gavin Lambert on Holliday: Lambert, On Cukor (Putnam, 1972; updated edition, ed. Robert Trachtenberg, Rizzoli, 2000).
Garson Kanin’s play Born Yesterday (Viking, 1946); Kanin’s writing of the shooting script of the film version without credit: On Cukor; McGilligan’s Kanin interview in Backstory 2: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1940s and 1950s (University of California Press, 1991); Albert Mannheimer (and Kanin, uncredited), Born Yesterday screenplay (Columbia Pictures, June 20, 1950). The Peter Cooper Village project spearheaded by Robert Moses: Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Knopf, 1974).
Show business blacklisting: American Business Consultants, Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television (Counterattack, 1950). Holliday’s appearance before U.S. Senate committee and her graylisting: Holtzman biography of Holliday; U.S. Senate Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws of the Committee on the Judiciary, Subversive Infiltration of Radio, Television, and the Entertainment Industry: Hearings, 82d Congress (U.S. Government Printing Office, March 26, 1952). Andy Warhol, “In the future”: Catalogue of an exhibition of his art in Stockholm, Sweden, 1968.