One of the ways a woman can gain public power is through the entertainment industry. In the first part of the 20th century, that was even more the case as the promise of women’s suffrage proved to not be the cure all for inequality. Anne Baxter took her talent to Hollywood where she struggled between fame and falling victim to the double standard for women actors which often cuts their career short. Through it all, she never stopped going for the roles she wanted on screen or elsewhere.
Baxter was born in on May 7, 1923, in Michigan City, Indiana. Her mother, Catherine Wright Baxter was the daughter of world-famous architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright. In a 1970 interview, she talked about her grandfather with radio host, Studs Terkel, she spoke fondly of him though she did not know him until she was in her mid-teens because of a family conflict.
Baxter caught the acting bug early in her life when she appeared in a school play at the age of five. The next year, her family moved to Westchester County in New York and Baxter continued to act in school shows. Attending Broadway in 1933, she saw Helen Hayes and Baxter decided she was going into that career. She started taking acting classes and by 1936, she originated the role of Elizabeth Winthrop in the Broadway play Seen But Not Heard. While Baxter’s early career saw three more plays on Broadway, she did not actively pursue the stage and turned to the big screen.
Baxter tried out for her first movie role at the age of 16 and by the next year, she had a contract with Twentieth Century-Fox for seven years. At that time in Hollywood, the late 1940s and the 1950s, studios controlled actors’ roles and could loan them out. It was such a loan to MGM that resulted in Baxter’s first movie role in the action comedy 20 Mule Team in 1940. Like many young actors, the studios could be harsh about the developing body but rather than blame the system, Baxter praised her parents for helping her learn to control her eating than just turning to diet pills and drugs. According to IMDb.com, Baxter was in 17 other films over the course of the next six years until the 1946 The Razor’s Edge for which she won both the Oscar and the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Supporting Role.
During the Terkel interview, Baxter mentioned the problem double standard of acting for woman. Interestingly, she also mentioned the women’s movement which surprised me given her support of Republican political candidates in the 1950s and 1960s and even called American women “spoiled” in a newspaper article after she moved to Australia to co-manage a ranch with her second husband, Randolph Galt, from home she divorced in 1969. While Baxter seemed aware of the injustices in American society, she felt it was more on her and other women to fight for what they wanted than to demand a change in society.
One way that Baxter fought back against the limiting of women actors, was to refuse to accept any label for her work. In fact, she made it a point in her career to play a wide range of roles. The caliber of the movies may not have always been ideal, but they did prove her ability to play multiple characters from young tragic mothers to scheming other women to comedic foils. She appeared on stage, both the big and small screens, and on over two dozen radio shows as guest star or actor. An attempt to create a production company in the late 1950s with her publicist, Russell Birdwell, seems to have done little but trying was more than many actors were able to do. Besides her Oscar and Golden Globe wins, she was nominated for second Oscar in 1951 (All About Eve) and a Primetime Emmy Award in 1969 (The Name of the Game).
Baxter worked until her death in 1985 at the age of 62 just eight days after a stroke. Everyone in the industry and her family was shocked by Baxter’s death because her stroke happened while she was merely walking. She had been filming her role as Victoria Cabot in the popular television series, Hotel, at the time; the series reunited her with Bette Davis from All About Eve. She is buried on her grandfather’s estate in the Lloyd Jones Cemetery in Spring Green, Wisconsin.