Rosalind Russell

Rosalind Russell was born in Waterbury, Connecticut, in 1907 and built her career on a specific and, for the period, unusual figure: the fast-talking, competent, unsentimental working woman, playing the type across three decades when few scripts allowed women that combination of intelligence and independence. Her defining performance opposite Grant came in Howard Hawks's His Girl Friday (1940), playing star reporter Hildy Johnson to Grant's conniving editor Walter Burns. Russell was not Hawks's first choice for the role — several established actresses reportedly turned it down before she was cast — and she is said to have hired her own writer to sharpen her lines to keep pace with Grant's. The resulting overlapping, rapid-fire dialogue between the two remains among the fastest sustained comic playing captured in American film, clocked by later scholars at well above normal screen dialogue speed. Russell's other major credits bracket that performance on both sides: George Cukor's The Women (1939), just before, and My Sister Eileen (1942) shortly after, followed later by two of her signature stage-to-screen vehicles, Auntie Mame (1958) and Gypsy (1962), in which she played Mama Rose. She received four Academy Award nominations for Best Actress over her career without a competitive win, and five Golden Globe Awards. In 1973, the Academy recognized her humanitarian work, much of it centered on arthritis research following her own long struggle with rheumatoid arthritis, with the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. She died in 1976.