Marjorie Main

Marjorie Main was born Mary Tomlinson, a Midwestern minister's daughter who took a stage name so as not to embarrass her devout family, and there is a lovely irony in the fact that this preacher's child became one of the loudest, brashest, most gloriously uncouth presences in American movies. Big-voiced and no-nonsense, she made a career of frontier women, boarding-house keepers and salt-of-the-earth battle-axes who could out-shout any man on screen.

She served a long apprenticeship in the theatre and arrived in Hollywood in her forties, initially typecast in grim, hard-bitten roles. She was harrowing as the slum mother in "Dead End" (1937), disowning her gangster son in a scene of real anguish, and she brought earthy comedy to the all-female cast of "The Women" (1939) as a tart-tongued ranch proprietor. She was a warm, bustling presence too, memorable as the cook in "Meet Me in St. Louis" (1944).

Her immortality arrived with a single character. As Ma Kettle, the frazzled, sharp-tongued matriarch of a brood of backwoods children, first in "The Egg and I" (1947) and then across a long-running series of films opposite Percy Kilbride's laconic Pa, she became a genuine box-office draw. The Kettle comedies were cheap, quickly made and enormously popular, keeping a whole studio afloat, and Main's performance, a whirlwind of hollering, hip-swinging exasperation, was their whole engine. Her turn in the first of them earned her an Academy Award nomination.

Main played Ma Kettle so many times that the character nearly swallowed her identity, but she brought to the caricature a genuine comic force and an unmistakable humanity; you never doubted this woman loved her impossible family. Off screen she was famously private and eccentric, but on it she was pure, generous energy.

She retired in the late 1950s and died in 1975. She never played glamorous and never wanted to, building instead a durable stardom out of loudness, plainness and heart. Marjorie Main proved there was a place at the top of the call sheet for a woman who looked and sounded like somebody's tough, loving, exhausting grandmother.