An actress with a captivating screen presence and a truly distinctive voice, Margaret Sullavan (1911-1960) was equally expert at comedy and drama. Born in Norfolk, Va., she studied drama from childhood and made her professional debut at 17. She was appearing on Broadway by age 20 and two years later became an instant movie star in the leading role of the soap opera Only Yesterday, which had been turned down by Claudette Colbert and Irene Dunne. Sullavan's radiant performance led to a three-year contract at Universal.

After several more minor sentimental dramas, Sullavan hit her stride at MGM, where she signed for six films. In Three Comrades (1938) she played Robert Taylor's tubercular wife so effectively that she won the New York Film Critics' Best Actress award and her only Oscar nomination. The Shopworn Angel (1938) was another success, with Sullavan stepping in for Joan Crawford as a worldly actress who falls in love with naive soldier James Stewart. Sullavan and Crawford appeared together in The Shining Hour (1938), a quadrangle romance with Robert Young and Melvyn Douglas as the men in their lives.

Sullavan reunited with Stewart for Ernst Lubitsch's charming period comedy The Shop Around the Corner (1940), playing the co-workers who don't realize that they are lonelyhearts correspondents; then again for The Mortal Storm (1940), playing lovers trying to flee Nazi Germany. At Universal, Sullavan and Charles Boyer starred in Back Street (1941), the definitive screen story of a kept woman and her married lover. Cry Havoc (1943), Sullavan's final project for MGM, was a highly-praised WWII movie in which she played one of several Red Cross nurses caught up in the war in the Pacific.

Never happy with film acting and carrying a reputation in Hollywood for being difficult, Sullavan returned to Broadway with considerable success and came back for one final movie, the ironically titled No Sad Songs for Me (1950). With personal problems that included worry about increasing deafness, she was found dead from barbiturate poisoning in a hotel room on New Year's Day 1960. Her four husbands included actor Henry Fonda, director William Wyler and agent Leland Hayward.

The movies in TCM's birthday tribute to Margaret Sullavan are Three Comrades (1938), Cry Havoc (1943), The Shopworn Angel (1938), The Shining Hour (1938) and The Mortal Storm (1940).