Career
Holliday began her show business career in 1938 as part of a night-club act called "The Revuers." The other four members of the group were Betty Comden, Adolph Green, Alvin Hammer and John Frank. The Revuers played engagements at various New York night clubs, including the Village Vanguard, Spivy's Roof, the Blue Angel and the Rainbow Room, and also the Trocadero in Hollywood, California. They disbanded in early 1944.
In 1944, she played a small but noticeable role as an airman's wife in the Twentieth Century Fox film version of the U.S. Army Air Forces' hit play Winged Victory. She did not appear in the stage version, which toured the U.S. both before and after production of the film.
Holliday made her Broadway debut on March 20, 1945, at the Belasco Theatre in Kiss Them for Me and was one of the recipients that year of the Clarence Derwent Award.
In 1946, she returned to Broadway as the scatterbrained Billie Dawn in Born Yesterday. Author Garson Kanin had written the play for his friend Jean Arthur. Arthur played the role of Billie out-of-town, but after illnesses she resigned. Kanin chose Holliday as her replacement.
In his book Tracy and Hepburn (1971), Kanin mentions that, when Columbia bought the rights to film Born Yesterday, studio boss Harry Cohn wouldn't consider casting the Hollywood-unknown Holliday. Kanin, together with George Cukor, Spencer Tracy, and Katharine Hepburn, conspired to promote Holliday by offering her a key part in the 1949 film Adam's Rib. She got rave reviews and Cohn offered her the chance to repeat her role for the film version, but only after she did a screen test (which at first was used only as a "benchmark against which to evaluate" other actresses being considered for the role). She won the first Golden Globe Award for Best Actress - Motion Picture Musical or Comedy and at the 23rd Academy Awards, Holliday won the Academy Award for Best Actress, over Gloria Swanson, nominated for Sunset Boulevard, Eleanor Parker, for Caged, and Bette Davis and Anne Baxter, both for All About Eve.
In 1954, she starred opposite then-newcomer Jack Lemmon in his first two feature films, the popular comedies It Should Happen to You and Phffft!
Bernard Dick summed up Holliday's acting: "Perhaps the most important aspect of the Judy Holliday persona, both in variations of Billie Dawn and in her roles as housewife, is her vulnerability...Her ability to shift her mood quickly from comic to serious is one of her greatest technical gifts." George Cukor said that she had "in common with the great comedians...that depth of emotion, that unexpectedly touching emotion, that thing which would unexpectedly touch your heart."
Read more about this topic: Judy Holliday
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