Ann Sheridan

A Texas girl from Denton, Clara Lou Sheridan won her way to Hollywood through a beauty contest and spent years grinding through bit parts before Warner Bros. decided to make her a star, largely through a publicity campaign that crowned her the Oomph Girl. It was a silly, faintly leering label, and Sheridan spent much of her career gently mocking it, but it worked: she became one of the studio's most popular contract players of the late 1930s and 1940s.

What the gimmick obscured was a genuinely gifted, likable performer with a husky voice, a quick wit, and an unpretentious sensuality that read as friendly rather than remote. She held her own against the toughest men on the Warner lot, trading barbs with James Cagney and Pat O'Brien in Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) and driving through the night beside George Raft and Humphrey Bogart in They Drive by Night. She showed real dramatic depth as the loyal hometown girl in Kings Row (1942), the small-town drama best remembered today as the film that gave Ronald Reagan his finest role, and she carried the noir melodrama Nora Prentiss.

Sheridan was also known as one of the more independent-minded stars of her era, willing to go on suspension rather than accept roles she thought beneath her and outspoken about the raw deal contract players received. She never took the myth of her own glamour too seriously, which only endeared her further to co-workers and audiences.

Her later career slowed as the studio system declined, and she worked in television, including a daytime serial, in her final years. She died of cancer in 1967 at just fifty-one, her life cut short at what might have been the start of a rich character-actress phase. Warmer and funnier than her marketing ever suggested, Sheridan is remembered fondly by those who look past the label to the sharp, generous talent underneath.