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Eve Arden
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Eve Arden | ||||||
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 Eve Arden with Armed Forces Radio Service in the 1940s |
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| Birth name | Eunice M. Quedens | |||||
| Born | April 30, 1908 Mill Valley, California, U.S. |
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| Died | November 12, 1990 (aged 82) Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
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| Resting place | Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery, Los Angeles, California |
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| Years active | 1929 – 1985 | |||||
| Spouse(s) | Ned Bergen (1939–47) Brooks West (1952–84) |
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Eve Arden (April 30, 1908 – November 12, 1990) was an Academy Award-nominated and Emmy-winning American actress. Her almost 60 year career crossed most media frontiers with supporting and leading roles, but she is now best remembered, perhaps, for playing the sardonic but engaging high school teacher in the classic Our Miss Brooks (radio and television), and as the sardonic high school principal in the films Grease and Grease 2.
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Arden was born Eunice Quedens (pronounced kwuh-DENZ) in Mill Valley, California to Lucille and Charles Peter Quedens. Her parents divorced when she was a child. Arden said that she was an insecure child, declaring later in life that she needed therapy because her mother was so much more beautiful than her.
At 16, Arden left Tamalpais High School[1] and joined a stock theater company. She made her film debut, under her real name, in the backstage musical Song of Love. She plays a wisecracking showgirl who becomes a rival to the film's star, singer Belle Baker. The film was one of Columbia Pictures' earliest successes.
Eve Arden's Broadway debut came in 1934, when she was cast in that year's Ziegfeld Follies revue.
Her film career began in earnest in 1937 when she appeared in the films Oh Doctor and Stage Door. Her performance in Stage Door, where she portrayed a fast-talking, witty supporting character, gained Arden considerable notice and was to be a template for many of Arden's future roles.
Her many memorable screen roles include a supporting role as Joan Crawford's wise-cracking pal in 1945's Mildred Pierce (for which she received an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actress), and James Stewart's wistful secretary in Otto Preminger's then-explicit murder mystery, Anatomy of a Murder (1959). (One of her co-stars in that film was husband Brooks West.) She also performed some acrobatics while trying to steal a wallet from Groucho Marx in the Marx Brothers film At the Circus (1939).
Arden's quick wit made her a natural talent for radio; she became a regular on Danny Kaye's short-lived but memorably zany comedy-variety show in 1946, which also featured swing bandleader Harry James and gravel-voiced character actor-comedian Lionel Stander.
Kaye's show lasted one season, but Arden's display of comic talent and timing set the stage for her to be cast in the role for which she is best known, as Madison High School English teacher Connie Brooks in Our Miss Brooks. Arden portrayed the character on radio from 1948 to 1957, in a television version of the program from 1952 to 1956 and in a 1956 feature film. Arden's character clashed with the school's principal, Osgood Conklin (played by Gale Gordon), and nursed an unrequited crush on fellow teacher Philip Boynton (played originally by future film star Jeff Chandler and later in the series by Robert Rockwell).
Arden's portrayal of the character was so popular that she was made an honorary member of the National Education Association, received a 1952 award from the Teachers College of Connecticut's Alumni Association "for humanizing the American teacher," and even received teaching job offers.
Arden won a radio listeners' poll by Radio Mirror magazine as the top ranking comedienne of 1948-1949, receiving her award at the end of an Our Miss Brooks broadcast that March. "I'm certainly going to try in the coming months to merit the honor you've bestowed upon me, because I understand that if I win this (award) two years in a row, I get to keep Mr. Boynton," she joked. But she was also a hit with the critics; a winter 1949 poll of newspaper and magazine radio editors taken by Motion Picture Daily named her the year's best radio comedienne.
Arden tried another series in 1957 with the eponymous The Eve Arden Show, but it was cancelled after only a few episodes.
Arden also co-starred with Kaye Ballard in the 1967-1969 situation comedy The Mothers-in-Law, which was produced by her old friend Desi Arnaz after the dissolution of Desilu. A few years afterward, she made a new sitcom pilot co-starring Don Knotts, but it failed to attract a network buyer.
She was one of many stars to take on the title roles in Hello, Dolly! and Auntie Mame in the 1960s; in 1967, she won the Sarah Siddons Award for her work in Chicago theatre.
She became familiar to a new generation of film-goers when she played harassed Principal McGee in both 1978's Grease and 1982's Grease 2, as well as making appearances on such television shows as Alice and Falcon Crest. In 1985 she appeared as the wicked stepmother in the Faerie Tale Theatre production of Cinderella.
Arden published her biography, The Three Phases of Eve, in 1985. It is notable for its discretion in regard to Arden's many co-stars, and her loyalty to the Hollywood studio system that nurtured her career.
In addition to her Academy Award nomination, Arden also received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6714 Hollywood Boulevard. She was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 1995.
She was married to Ned Bergen from 1939 to 1947, and to actor Brooks West from 1952 until his death in 1984 from a heart ailment. She and West had four children, three of whom were adopted.
Arden died of advanced colorectal cancer and heart disease at her home in Los Angeles, California at the age of 82, and is interred in the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Westwood, California.
- ^ Tamalpais High School Alumni Directory. 2002. Harris Publishing Co., p 237. Lists "Quedens, Eunice M." in the Class of 1926.
- Sitcom Queens: Divas of the Small Screen by Michael Karol (2005) ISBN 0-595-40251-8
Categories: 1908 births | 1990 deaths | American stage actors | American film actors | American radio actors | American television actors | Emmy Award winners | Hollywood Walk of Fame | Sarah Siddons Award winners | Showgirls appearing as Ziegfeld Girls | People from Marin County, California | Colorectal cancer deaths | Deaths from cardiovascular disease