Jean Arthur

Gladys Georgianna Greene was born in Plattsburgh, New York, the daughter of an itinerant photographer, and drifted into modeling and then bit parts in silent Westerns, where for years she was a pretty, forgettable ingenue. Sound changed everything. When the microphones arrived, they caught a voice unlike any other in pictures: husky, catching, breaking into an upper register like a foghorn wrapped in velvet. Directors who had ignored her suddenly heard a personality.

It was Frank Capra who understood what he had. In a run of films that defined Depression-era American optimism, he cast her as the wised-up, warm-hearted working woman who falls for an idealist and learns to believe again: the cynical reporter melting for Gary Cooper in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), the secretary in You Can't Take It with You, and the sharp-tongued aide who guides Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). She embodied Capra's faith that ordinary people, prodded by decency, would do the right thing.

Her gift was for comedy played at high speed with an undertow of feeling; she could deliver a wisecrack and let her eyes betray the ache beneath it. She earned an Oscar nomination for the housing-crunch farce The More the Merrier (1943) and, near the end of her screen career, brought a wistful maternal grace to Shane (1953).

Offscreen she was one of Hollywood's most tormented stars, crippled by stage fright and a loathing of publicity so severe she was known to be physically ill before scenes and to hide in her dressing room for hours. She feuded with Columbia's Harry Cohn, let her contract lapse the moment it ended, and walked away from stardom with visible relief. In later years she taught drama at Vassar and North Adams, quietly bewildering students who half-recognized the frightened woman at the front of the room as one of the screen's great comediennes. She remains an actress adored by those who know her and unjustly obscure to those who don't.