"She was intelligent and not at all like the dumb blondes she so often depicted.... She didn't give a damn where the camera was placed, how she was made to look, or about being a star. She just played the scene -- acted with, not at. She was also one of the nicest people I ever met."
-Two-time co-star Jack Lemmon

Judy Holliday was a walking contradiction. The quintessential dumb blonde on-screen, off-screen she had an IQ of 172 and was noted as one of the wittiest members of the New York theatre crowd (on seeing a display of ferns in a friend's apartment, she once quipped, "With fronds like these, who needs anemones"). A bit of a frump in many of her roles because of a waistline that refused to conform to Hollywood convention, she could be a red-hot mama in the recording studio (Madonna would later cite her jazz albums as an influence on her singing). Though Holliday's career flowered for only a few years in the '50s, she left behind an impressive body of work nonetheless.

Holliday, born Judith Tuvim, had been in love with the theatre since her mother enrolled her in ballet classes as a child. She got her first big break in show business with Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre -- as a switchboard operator. Welles also cast her in her first film, the lost short Too Much Johnson (1938). From there, she hooked up with the writing team of Betty Comden and Adolph Green with a nightclub act called The Revuers. That led to her first Hollywood film, Greenwich Village (1944), though most of the team's antics were cut. After a year at 20th Century-Fox, she returned to New York to focus on theatre. When Jean Arthur pulled out of the stage version of Born Yesterday just weeks before the show's Broadway premiere, Holliday took over and a show-biz legend was born. As Billie Dawn, the dumb showgirl who develops a brain and turns the tables on her abusive junk-dealer boyfriend, she wowed the critics.

She was the perfect choice to play the role on screen, but Harry Cohn at Columbia had bought it for his own resident sexpot, Rita Hayworth. Instead, Holliday landed a choice part as a dimwitted wife who shoots her cheating husband in Adam's Rib (1949), a major studio comedy for Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. That film's director, George Cukor, was also set to direct Born Yesterday (1950) and was determined to get Holliday as the film's star. He enlisted Hepburn to turn Holliday's big scene in Adam's Rib into a virtual screen test. In one long take, Holliday answers Hepburn's questions about the shooting, allowing a thousand emotions to dance across her face. Hepburn refused to shoot any close-ups for the scene, forcing them to use the single shot of Holliday, which was then mailed to Cohn. Since Hayworth was staging one of her frequent rebellions against the studio anyway, Cohn picked Holliday over such hot contenders for the role as Lucille Ball and the young Marilyn Monroe.

After Born Yesterday, director George Cukor cast Holliday as the female lead in his next film too - The Marrying Kind (1952), an offbeat comedy-drama that attempted to paint a realistic portrait of a contemporary marriage and is more highly regarded now than it was at the time.

Both Adam's Rib and Born Yesterday were personal triumphs for Holliday, with the latter bringing her the Oscar® for Best Actress over stiff competition from Bette Davis in All About Eve and Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard. But it also typecast her as a dumb blonde, a role that severely hampered her potential. And her stardom cost her a role her friends Comden and Green had written for her, Lina Lamont, the dumb silent-screen star in Singin' in the Rain. Although the character was based on Holliday's performances with The Revuers, she was too big a star in 1952 to take a supporting role, so it went to Jean Hagen, who had stolen Holliday's husband in Adam's Rib.

Also adversely affecting Holliday's career were the anti-Communist politics of the day. A staunch liberal, Holliday was linked to several groups labeled as "Commie fronts." She avoided blacklisting by going before the House Un-American Activities Committee and playing dumb -- they expected her to be like her screen characters, so that's what she gave them.

After starring in a handful of other films in the '50s, including Jack Lemmon's film debut in It Should Happen to You (1954) and their follow-up vehicle Pffft! (1954), Holliday returned to the stage for her last great hit, Bells Are Ringing (1960). The role of Ella Peterson, an answering service operator who takes on different roles for each of her company's clients, was tailor-made for her by Comden and Green and brought her the 1957 Tony for Best Actress in a Musical. The film version in 1960 would mark her last big-screen appearance. Holliday died of breast cancer in 1966, just a few weeks shy of her 44th birthday.

by Frank Miller