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Andrea Leeds

Andrea Leeds

Birth : 1914-08-14, Butte, Montana, USA

Death : 1984-05-21

History

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Andrea Leeds (August 18, 1914 – May 21, 1984) was an American film actress. A popular supporting player of the late 1930s, Leeds was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Stage Door (1937). She was progressing to leading roles, when she retired from acting following her marriage in 1939, and was later a successful horse breeder. She began her film career in 1933 playing bit parts and using her given name. As Andrea Leeds she played her first substantial role in the film Come and Get It (1936) and achieved another success with her next film It Could Happen to You! (1937). As part of an ensemble cast that included Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers and Lucille Ball, Leeds was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance as an aspiring actress in Stage Door (1937). She read for the role of Melanie in Gone with the Wind, however the role was given to Olivia de Havilland. Her wholesome quality led to her being cast in The Goldwyn Follies (1938) playing "Miss Humanity" – a woman considered by a jaded Hollywood executive to represent the ideal American woman. The film was not a success and received poor reviews. She next appeared in two films opposite Joel McCrea (who earlier played her brother in Come and Get It), Youth Takes a Fling (1938) and They Shall Have Music (1939), for the first time playing the lead female role. She continued to play the romantic female lead in an adventure film set in the 1906 Philippines, The Real Glory, opposite Gary Cooper and David Niven, and opposite Don Ameche in the first Technicolor biography of Stephen Foster, Swanee River (1939). Her final film, Earthbound (1940), was a fantasy murder mystery in which Leeds' character solves the murder of her husband, aided by his ghost. These films were relatively successful and Leeds remained a popular actress. In 1939 she married Robert Stewart Howard, son of California businessman and racehorse owner Charles S. Howard, and decided to leave films to devote herself to raising a family. Her father-in-law owned and raced Seabiscuit, and with her husband she became a successful horse owner/breeder.

Profile

Andrea Leeds

Movies

The Making of a Legend: Gone with the Wind

The Making of a Legend: Gone with the Wind

(archive footage)

This documentary revisits the making of Gone with the Wind via archival footage, screen tests, insightful interviews and rare film footage.

Ellen Besborough

A murdered man helps his widow bring his killer to justice.

Jane McDowell Foster

Swanee River is a 1940 American biopic about Stephen Foster, a songwriter from Pittsburgh who falls in love with the South, marries a Southern girl, then is accused of sympathizing when the Civil War breaks out. Typical of 20th Century Fox biopics of the time, the film is more fictional than factual biography.

Linda Hartley

In the wake of the Spanish-American war, military doctor Bill Canavan (Cooper) arrives at a war-torn Filipino outpost. Infested with cholera and under attack from a vicious local Moro chieftain, the troops are terrified and their commanding officer has all but given up hope. Outnumbered and out of supplies, Canavan decides to trade his scalpel for a rifle and rally the few remaining troops into one last stand before the outpost and everyone inside becomes just another footnote in history.

They Shall Have Music

They Shall Have Music

Ann Lawson

The future is bleak for a troubled boy from a broken home in the slums. He runs away when his step father breaks his violin, ending up sleeping in the basement of a music school for poor children.

Youth Takes a Fling

Youth Takes a Fling

Helen Brown

McCrea plays Joe Meadows, whose only ambition as a Kansas farm boy was a life at sea. He moves to New York to try to get a job as a sailor, finds it more difficult than he thought, and meets Helen Brown, who falls for him and uses her feminine wiles to try to prevent him leaving.

Letter of Introduction

Letter of Introduction

Kay Martin

An aging actor, trying to make a comeback on Broadway, is surprised when his estranged daughter shows up. It seems that she is an actress and is also trying to make it on Broadway. He tries to re-establish his relationship with her while also trying to hide the fact that she is his daughter from the press.

The Goldwyn Follies

The Goldwyn Follies

Hazel Dawes

Movie producer chooses a simple girl to be "Miss Humanity" and to critically evalute his movies from the point of view of the ordinary person.

Kay Hamilton

The ups and downs in the lives and careers of a group of ambitious young actresses and show girls from disparate backgrounds brought together in a theatrical hostel. Centres particularly on the conflict and growing friendship between Terry Randall, a rich girl confident in her talent and ability to make it to the top on the stage, and Jean Maitland, a world weary and cynical trouper who has taken the hard knocks of the ruthless and over-populated world of the Broadway apprentice.

It Could Happen to You

It Could Happen to You

Laura Compton

A politically charged story about a man who dabbles in crime, with disastrous results, to gain the capital he needs to purchase a school where immigrants are prepared for American citizenship. The school's European teacher dreams of a fascist America. Based on a story by Nathanael West and Samuel Ornitz, who was one of the Hollywood Ten blacklisted during the McCarthy Era.

Come and Get It

Come and Get It

Evvie Glasgow

An ambitious lumberjack abandons his saloon girl lover so that he can marry into wealth, but years later becomes infatuated with the woman's daughter.

Socialite at Scavenger Hunt (uncredited)

Fifth Avenue socialite Irene Bullock needs a "forgotten man" to win a scavenger hunt, and no one is more forgotten than Godfrey Park, who resides in a dump by the East River. Irene hires Godfrey as a servant for her riotously unhinged family, to the chagrin of her spoiled sister, Cornelia, who tries her best to get Godfrey fired. As Irene falls for her new butler, Godfrey turns the tables and teaches the frivolous Bullocks a lesson or two.

Song of the Trail

Song of the Trail

Betty Hobson

A cowboy realizes too late that his girlfriend's father had been cheated out of everything in a crooked card game. He sets out to get revenge on the crooks.

Nurse

Story of the gold strike on an immigrant's property that started the 1849 California Gold Rush.

The Count Takes the Count

The Count Takes the Count

Gloria Grayson

Charley Chase' insurance company has a million dollar policy on Andrea Leeds' wedding coming off. When Andrea runs away and cons Charley into thinking she's a detective in pursuit of herself, there's no shortage of great laughs.

Dante's Inferno

Dante's Inferno

Anna

A carny builds a gambling empire at the expense of his family's wellbeing.

Nurse

A romantic triangle during WW I provides the basis of this drama. The trouble begins when a young wife gets involved with a coffee baron while her husband is off fighting WW I. Her shell-shocked husband finally returns. He is terribly jealous. To help him, the wife takes him to a Western dude ranch. Her lover also goes, and the two men soon become friends. The coffee magnate helps to cure him, but then breaks his heart by telling him that he and the wife are planning to run away.

College Girl (uncredited)

A charlatan posing as Baron Munchhausen is invited to be guest speaker at a girls' school.