In her time she was one of the brightest stars in the Hollywood firmament.
Born Clara Lou Sheridan in Texas in 1915, she was a tomboy as a girl. Ann trained as a teacher before a beauty contest win — which came with a screen test at Paramount –intervened. (She made her movie debut at the studio with 1934’s Search For Beauty.) The win in a “Search For Beauty” contest landed her that Paramount Pictures contract.
Later, at Warner Bros., she was dubbed “the Oomph Girl” — a designation she resisted.
Sheridan was far more than a sex symbol, as worthy as that is. She was an actress of impressive versatility co-starring in hard boiled crime dramas — check her out in director Raoul Walsh’s 1940 gem, They Drive By Night opposite Humphrey Bogart and George Raft. (She excelled as well in “womens’ pictures” and in musicals.)
She played a sassy secretary in 1941’s Honeymoon For Three opposite dapper George Brent (Bette Davis’ favorite leading man and one-time lover). Whatever Brent had Sheridan liked since the two married in 1942 (it lasted a year). It was the second of her three marriages.
Although not a musical star, per se, Ann was allowed to sing in several films and had a damned good voice.
Catch a sleeper called It All Came True. The film was released in April 1940, when Sheridan was big box office. She got top billing ahead of Jeffrey Lynn, her love interest and then, Humphrey Bogart, who plays a crook hiding out in Lynn’s mother’s boarding house. Bogart turns the house into a nightclub where Ann and Lynn perform.
A few years later she co-starred with Dennis Morgan in Shine on Harvest Moon.
Most movie fans, if they remember Sheridan singing at all, remember her production number in one particular movie — Thank Your Lucky Stars, Warner’s all star vehicle about entertaining at the Hollywood Canteen. Ann in a negligee, in a bedroom setting belted out the provocative tune, “Love isn’t born, It’s made!”
Her most memorable film role for us remains in the little noted 1950 film noir Woman on the Run. Ann plays a wife pursuing her husband (a witness to a murder) amidst the blandishments of an all-too-accommodating journalist played by Dennis O’Keefe. No sex, no singing. Just some honest acting.
Sheridan’s career extended into the late Fifties, about a decade before her death from cancer at age 51 in 1967. We will always remember her as the classic screen knockout who could also sing.
Kings Row, The Man Who Came to Dinner, They Drive By Night, The Unfaithful, Woman on the Run, Nora Prentiss, George Washington Slept Here, It All Came True, and so on. All fun to watch, all enhanced by Ann Sheridan. She gave the impression of being accessible. I hope she had some real happiness during her all-too-short life.
They are all movies I became acquainted or reacquainted with through Turner Classic Movies. I know it’s expensive, but to me it’s a far more intimate experience than watching things on YouTube, as valuable a resource as that is.
And TCM does keep the flame alive of a lot of actors who otherwise would be closer to forgotten than they are.
ANN SHERIDAN…
Lots of classic Hollywood stars are cast as the tough but tender wise-cracking dame, but perhaps none embody the archetype as well as Ann Sheridan – the infamous “Oomph Girl”. Movie buffs remember the WWII pin-up as much for her comebacks as her comely sex appeal, and her BS-detecting withering looks were as effective as her redheaded good looks.
In 1939, a comment by well-known columnist Walter Winchell inspired one of Hollywood’s most successful publicity gimmicks. Praising her role in Cagney’s gangster drama ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES (the title refers to the Dead End Kids in the movie), Winchell said she deserved parts with more “umph.” Warner Brothers assembled a team of judges – including Busby Berkeley and Hollywood’s pre-eminent glamour photographer George Hurrell — to select the star who best deserved the “Oomph Girl” title. Ann, ahem, “won” the undoubtedly rigged competition, beating out (or so we were led to believe) such hotties as Alice Faye, Carole Lombard, Hedy Lamarr and Marlene Dietrich. “Oomph” was the 30s euphemism for indefinable sex appeal, just as “It” had been in the 20s when author Elinor Glyn decreed that Clara Bow was the definitive “It Girl.” While it can be argued that the nickname really put her over, Sheridan always hated it, saying “Oomph” is the sound a fat man makes when he leans over to tie his shoelace.
Ann was uncomfortable achieving stardom through via the cheesy stunt, until famous (over)actor Paul Muni told her to exploit the exposure to give her leverage with the studio and secure herself better roles. Meanwhile, her pal George Hurrell’s glamour portraits really helped capture Sheridan’s sloe-eyed sensuality, making her one of the biggest pin-up girls in the War years. (Like Bonita Granville and Deanna Durbin, Sheridan even became a heroine sleuth in a series of Nancy Drewesque mysteries for teens.)
But just as other Warner players like Cagney and Davis knew only too well, good parts weren’t easy to come by. “I had to fight for everything at Warners. A knock-down, drag-out fight. You didn’t always win, but it let them know you were alive,” said Sheridan. “ I would never have gotten the role in Kings Row if I hadn’t fought for it, and that was one of the best parts I ever had at the studio.” In fact, Sheridan enjoyed top billing as the tomboy heroine of Sam Wood’s KINGS ROW (1942), the film where a small-town surgeon sadistically amputates Ronald Reagan’s legs. (Upon discovering this, Ronald famously cries “Where’s the rest of me?!”)
However, Ann made some rather poor career choices, most notably turning down the lead in MILDRED PIERCE, the noir film for which Joan Crawford won her Best Actress Oscar. Speaking of iffy decisions, in 1942, Sheridan married co-star George Brent, the stalwart dependable leading man Bette Davis and others had had their eye on. But the union that lasted only a year. Seems Errol Flynn was at it, again.
Ann had been in several of Flynn’s pictures and she considered him a good friend. So good that it appears they resumed their romancing on the set of the 1942 war drama, EDGE OF DARKNESS. Though Sheridan only ever had good things to say about him, Errol was less gallant. He once called Ann “a star’s perk who made good” and claimed to have furthered her career. The filming of Edge of Darkness occurred during Errol’s infamous rape trial and Flynn unchivalrously blamed his old flame for his increasing reliance on vodka, me to get him to the set.
Not gentlemanly, but possibly not far from true… Scriptwriter Stephen Longstreet recounts “By 1947, Flynn had deteriorated. That year, I wrote the screenplay of SILVER RIVER to star him and Ann Sheridan. She too, as the director told me, was ‘lapping up the sauce’. It soon became clear that they were, even if we didn’t see how. [Later on set] I went over and tasted the ice water. It was pure 90-proof vodka.” (It has been said that stars like Judy Garland, Sheridan and Flynn used to inject vodka into whole oranges to hide their habit.)
Between the alcohol and, perhaps even worse by Hollywood standards – the fact that Ann’s Oomph was now in its 30s (oh the horror!) – it’s not surprising that Silver River was one of the last films she made for Warner Brothers. (The other is an uncredited bit as a Mexican prostitute in the 1948 classic THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE.) Now a free agent, the only film of real note was Howard Hawks’ comedy I WAS A MALE WAR BRIDE, where she memorably co-starred with an in-drag Cary Grant. During filming Ann remarked, “There have been three phases of my career — and the present one, playing comedy and to hell with the Oomph, is by far the most satisfying.”
“They always thought of me as ‘The Oomph Girl’. I could never convince them that I could act,” Ann said of her days at Warner Brothers. Perhaps Sheridan never realized the rich legacy she’s left us as the quintessential quipping tough cookie with the sleepy sloe-eyes and great big heart. Like her Warner contemporaries Ida Lupino and Joan Blondell, she is cherished today for her quick-wit and down to earth straightforwardness.
I agree with Joe & Frank, WOMAN ON THE RUN was one of her most memorable and dramatic pictures… And here it is, fully restored and FREE for you to watch on YouTube-
httpss://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3S3oleNZaE
Love that picture with Bogie smiling! I happened to catch It All Came True last month and loved Ann’s part in it. She always strikes me as an actress of depth and intelligence even when playing glamour puss or comedy roles.
The pic of hers I’ve always enjoyed most is 1940’s “Torrid Zone” with Cagney and Pat O’Brien along with George Tobias and Andy Devine; not a bad moment in it, and it’s a shame there’s no commentary track on any release of it.
BTW, in WW2 when the Army and Navy were making their plans to invade the Japanese home island of Honshu in the spring of ’46 (Operation Coronet), they named three of the four main invasion areas after Hollywood stars—Grable, Sheridan and Lamour, each one subdivided into North and South. I think Beaches North and South Sheridan were northeast of Tokyo, to the east of where today’s Narita Airport stands.