Wright, Teresa

(b. 27 October 1918 in New York City; d. 6 March 2005 in New Haven, Connecticut), Oscar-winning actress who redefined the Hollywood ingénue as an intelligent girl next door equipped to be an equal partner in rapidly changing post–War World II American society.

Wright was born Muriel Teresa Wright, the only child of Margaret Espy Wright and Arthur Wright, an insurance agent. The family moved around in Wright’s early childhood but finally settled in Maplewood, New Jersey. Attendance at a one-woman performance by Cornelia Otis Skinner and a trip to Broadway, where Wright saw Helen Hayes in Victoria Regina, inspired her to act in school plays. Her high intelligence, social grace, natural beauty, moral integrity, and sense of responsibility benefited Wright in becoming a serious actress. She apprenticed for two summers at the Wharf Theatre in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and then, after graduating from Columbia High School in 1938, moved to New York City. Actors Equity already listed a Muriel Wright, so she selected her middle name and became Teresa Wright.

Wright made the audition rounds and in 1938 understudied for Dorothy McGuire in the lead role of Emily Webb in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. She made her professional stage debut in Washington, D.C., as Rebecca Gibbs, the first in a series of parts in which she defined the depth of the young American female. In the spring of 1939, during a New England tour of Our Town, Wright took over the lead as Emily, the quintessential hometown American girl. That summer, Wright, a petite woman with a youthful, innocent glow, performed mainly juvenile roles with the Barnstormers of Tamworth, New Hampshire. Returning to New York, Wright played her first ingénue as Mary Skinner, in Life with Father.

A talent scout urged his boss, Samuel Goldwyn, to offer Wright a movie contract. Smitten with her talent, beauty, and genuine unaffected appeal, Goldwyn signed the twenty-year-old as his first female contract player. The actress was so determined to be taken seriously that she had a clause inserted into the contract stipulating that she “not be required to pose for photographs in a bathing suit unless she is in the water.” Likewise, she would not be shot “in shorts” or even “digging in a garden” or “whipping up a meal, attired in firecrackers and holding skyrockets for the Fourth of July; looking insinuatingly at a Turkey for Thanksgiving... [or] twinkling on prop snow in a ski outfit while a fan blows her scarf.” These provisos were groundbreaking and emphasized how young actresses had been trivialized and exploited; they also clearly underscored that this ingénue was interested in the art of acting and not glamour, image, or movie-star fame.

In Wright’s first screen characterization, as Alexandra Giddens in The Little Foxes (1941), she played the daughter of Bette Davis and Herbert Marshall. The role garnered her an Oscar nomination. In 1942 Wright won two roles: the first playing Greer Garson’s and Walter Pidgeon’s daughter in Mrs. Miniver and the second as Eleanor Gehrig, the wife of the famed Yankees first baseman Lou Gehrig, in The Pride of the Yankees. She became only the third actor to be nominated for an Oscar for both a supporting and a lead role in the same year and the only actor in history to be nominated for her first three screen performances. That year, on 23 May, Wright also married the screenwriter Niven Busch.

In Alfred Hitchcock’s film Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Wright plays a wholesome teenager named after her revered Uncle Charlie (played by Joseph Cotton). The role continued to reveal Wright’s emotional range as she makes the transition from adoring niece to her murderous uncle’s most ardent adversary when she discovers that her namesake is not the idealized brother her mother worships but instead a mass murderer of rich widows. That year Wright won the Oscar for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for Mrs. Miniver.

Goldwyn cast Wright in the ensemble of The North Star (1943). After rehearsals and a costume fitting, Wright informed Goldwyn that she was pregnant and left work on the film. Her first child was born in 1944, and she briefly went back to work. In The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), Wright shattered the stereotype of the pliable girl next door in her role as Peggy Stephenson, a young woman whose honest relationship with her parents and ability to accept changing mores gives her the strength to engage in a relationship with a veteran trapped in a loveless marriage. Wright’s performance elevated women’s contribution to the rebuilding of postwar America’s psyche.

In 1947, after preparing to star in The Bishop’s Wife, Wright became pregnant again; her daughter was born in September. Ill health prevented Wright from starring in Roseanna McCoy (1949), and Goldwyn dropped his star from the studio roster. But Wright had no regrets about losing the $5,000-weekly salary and set new goals for her career. Her marriage to Niven Busch ended in divorce on 25 November 1952. In 1957 Wright returned to the New York stage in William Inge’s play The Dark at the Top of the Stairs. She acted on Broadway and in regional theater throughout the 1970s. Wright married the playwright Robert Anderson on 11 December 1959. After a divorce from Anderson, she was briefly married to the actor Carlos Pierre. She remarried Anderson, but they divorced again in 1978 and remained close life-long friends.

Wright’s movie career continued, but roles were fewer and farther between and below the high standard she had set. She had roles in The Men (1950), The Steel Trap (1952), Count the Hours (1953), The Search for Bridey Murphy (1956), The Restless Years (1958), Hail, Hero! and The Happy Ending (both 1969), Roseland (1977), Somewhere in Time (1980), The Good Mother (1988), and The Rainmaker (1997). Wright also had a solid television career and received three Emmy nominations, one for her work as Annie Sullivan in The Miracle Worker (1957), another for the title role in The Margaret Bourke White Story (1960), and a third for her performance in “The Elders” episode of the Columbia Broadcasting System series Dolphin Cove (1989).

Wright died at the age of eighty-six of a heart attack in New Haven, Connecticut. She will be remembered as a woman who defined acting as a significant profession, an actress who eschewed celebrity to develop the art of her craft and to portray characters that honestly reflected her times and did not perpetuate Hollywood conventions and stereotypes.

No biographies of Wright have yet been published. Her years at Goldwyn are discussed in Arthur Marx, Goldwyn: A Biography of the Man Behind the Myth (1976); and A. Scott Berg, Goldwyn: A Biography (1998). Obituaries are in the New York Times (8 Mar. 2005) and Washington Post (9 Mar. 2005).

Vincent LoBrutto