Following somewhat in the footsteps of Marie Dressler (although never quite so big a star), Marjorie Main established herself as a salty, no-nonsense character actress who never failed to win attention despite her homely looks and mildly abrasive personality. She even shared Dressler's most compatible leading man, Wallace Beery, in a series of films in the 1940s. Main then teamed with another down-home actor, Percy Kilbride, to play Ma and Pa Kettle in a series of country comedies beginning with The Egg and I (1947), the film that brought her only Oscar® nomination (as Best Supporting Actress).

Born Mary Tomlinson in Acton, Indiana, in 1890, she changed her name to Marjorie Main to avoid embarrassing her minister father when she became an actress with a local stock company. After experience in vaudeville, she made her Broadway debut in a bit role in 1916. She would return to the New York stage in the 1930s in a series of strong featured roles.

Main began in films with an uncredited bit in A House Divided (1931). She played Barbara Stanwyck's impoverished mother in Stella Dallas (1937) and Humphrey Bogart's in Dead End (1937). Her success in the latter role, which she originally played on Broadway, led to a number of other "slum mother" characters. Since she had no children of her own, Main was amused by her frequent casting as a mother (she had 15 kids in the Kettle films) and was fond of exclaiming, "Now, that's acting!"

She recreated another stage role as the feisty dude ranch operator in The Women (1939) at MGM, where she settled in as resident character actress in such films as I Take This Woman (1940), Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), The Harvey Girls (1946) and The Long, Long Trailer (1953). She had a rare starring role at MGM as the title character in Tish (1942), based on the Mary Roberts Rinehart stories about a pleasantly bossy woman who manipulates the lives of those around her.

It was at Universal Studios that Main was cast as the character that would define the later stage of her career -- Ma Kettle in The Egg and I, based on the novel by Betty MacDonald and starring Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray as a city couple trying to cope with country life after moving to the Ozarks. (The TV series Green Acres (1965-1971) seemed very obviously inspired by this film.)

Main and Kilbride took center stage in a sequel, Ma and Pa Kettle (1949), then settled into the popular series of comedies that were inexpensive but made a fortune for Universal. Main played Ma Kettle for the tenth time in The Kettles on Old MacDonald's Farm (1957), in which Parker Fennelly stands in for Kilbride as the shiftless Pa Kettle. That was Main's last theatrical film, although she did appear in a couple of Wagon Train TV episodes the following year. Married to Stanley LeFevre Krebs from 1921 to his death in 1935, she passed away in 1975.

by Roger Fristoe