Career
Nolan began her acting career at the Pasadena Playhouse in Pasadena, California, and, while a student at Los Angeles City College, made her radio debut in 1932 in Omar Khayyam, the first transcontinental broadcast from station KHJ, and continued acting until the 1990s. She made her film debut as Lady Macbeth in Orson Welles's 1948 film Macbeth, based on Shakespeare's play of the same name. Despite the fact that she and the film received withering reviews at the time, Nolan's film career flourished in largely supporting roles. Viewers of film noir may know her best as the corrupt wife of a dead (and equally corrupt) police officer in Fritz Lang's The Big Heat. Her final film appearance was in Robert Redford's The Horse Whisperer as Robert Redford's mother.
Nolan made over three hundred television appearances, including Brian Keith's first series, Crusader, in the role of Dr. Marion in "The Healer" (1956). She also appeared on Rod Cameron's syndicated series, State Trooper. From 1959 to 1960, she was cast as Annette Deveraux, part-owner of the hotel in the CBS western series Hotel de Paree. In 1960 she appeared in season 4, episode 7, of Have Gun - Will Travel as the newly widowed Sheriff. She appeared in other western films, most notably The Wild Women of Chastity Gulch (1982).
Nolan made many guest appearances in the Perry Mason, including the 1958 episode "The Case of the Fugitive Nurse." She gave an over-the-top performance as a crazed old woman in the "Parasite Mansion" episode of Thriller. She appeared in the April 27, 1962, episode "A Book of Faces" on ABC's crime drama Target: The Corruptors!. She guest starred as Claire Farnham in the episode "To Love Is to Live" on the NBC medical drama about psychiatry, The Eleventh Hour. She appeared three times on Wagon Train, the western series in which her husband John McIntire starred as wagonmaster Chris Hale from 1961 to 1965. She guest starred three times in 1963 to 1964 on NBC's Dr. Kildare and in a 1964 episode of Richard Crenna's short-lived Slattery's People political drama on CBS.
Nolan played the role of witches in two of Rod Serling's anthology television series; in The Twilight Zone episode "Jess-Belle" with Anne Francis, and the Night Gallery episode "Since Aunt Ada Came to Stay" with James Farentino and Michele Lee.
On November 4, 1965, she appeared as the treacherous Ma Burns in "The Golden Trail" episode of NBC's Laredo, having portrayed a supposedly refined woman trying to hijack a presumed gold shipment, which in actuality is thirty-six bottles of Tennessee whiskey. Laredo was a spinoff of the The Virginian, whose cast Nolan joined in 1967, along with her husband John McIntire.
Nolan also guest-starred on the short-lived situation comedy, The Mothers-in-Law in two separate episodes in the show's second and final season. She first played Kaye Ballard's grandmother, Gabriela Balotta, who always fainted when she didn't get her way; and then secondly as Annie MacTaggart, a Scottish nanny hired to take care of newborn twins of the younger couple, Jerry and Suzie Buell.
She appeared regularly in several radio series: Young Dr. Malone, 1939–40; Cavalcade of America, 1940–41; Nicolette Moore in One Man's Family, 1947–50; and The Great Gildersleeve, 1949-52. She appeared episodically in many more.
In 1974, she starred briefly with Dack Rambo in CBS's Dirty Sally, a spinoff of the Gunsmoke western series where she had played a recurring guest role for eight episodes. She also played the titular role in the award-winning short film Peege (1972) because of her Gunsmoke connection. In all, Nolan appeared as a guest star in television's Gunsmoke more than any other female. She appeared with Judd Hirsch in Dear John, and Harry Anderson in Night Court.
She played the role of Mrs Peck in the Columbo episode Double Shock. She played Alma, Rose Nylund's adoptive mother, in one episode of the hit series The Golden Girls.
Read more about this topic: Jeanette Nolan
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“I restore myself when I’m alone. A career is born in public—talent in privacy.”
—Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962)
“The problem, thus, is not whether or not women are to combine marriage and motherhood with work or career but how they are to do so—concomitantly in a two-role continuous pattern or sequentially in a pattern involving job or career discontinuities.”
—Jessie Bernard (20th century)
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)