British postcard in the Colourgraph Series, London, no. C 320. Photo: Warner Bros / First National.
British postcard in the Picturegoer Series, London, no. 1120b. Photo: Paramount.
British postcard in the Picturegoer Series, London, no. W. 794. Photo: Allied Artists.
Teenage amateur sleuth Nancy Drew
Bonita Granville was born in Manhattan, New York, in 1923. She was the daughter of Rosina (née Timponi) and Bernard Granville. Both her parents were stage performers and Bonita's theatre career began as a child. Before her tenth birthday, she made her film debut in Westward Passage (Robert Milton, 1932), starring Ann Harding and Laurence Olivier.
In the following years, she got mostly extra roles, such as in Cavalcade (Frank Lloyd, 1933) with Diana Wynyard, the famous Little Women (George Cukor, 1933) starring Katharine Hepburn, and The Garden of Allah (Richard Boleslawski, 1936) with Marlene Dietrich.
Granville proved herself in a bigger role in These Three (William Wyler, 1936), the film adaptation of Lillian Hellman's 1934 stage play 'The Children's Hour'. The film tells the story of three adults (played by Miriam Hopkins, Merle Oberon, and Joel McCrea) who find their lives almost destroyed when an attention-seeking schoolgirl accuses one of her schoolmistresses (Hopkins) of an illicit sexual affair with McCrea, who is Oberon's fiance. For her role as that child, Granville was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, then the youngest person to be nominated for an Oscar. In Hellmann's play, the schoolmistresses were accused of lesbianism but when it was filmed, the lesbian angle totally disappeared.
In 1937, Warner Bros. bought the rights to the book series about teenage amateur sleuth Nancy Drew. From 1938 to 1939, Bonita Granville played the girl detective in a series of four B films. All of them were directed by William Clemens and had the same primary cast with Granville as Nancy Drew, John Litel as her father Carson Drew, and Frankie Thomas as Ted Nickerson. The first two films did well enough to allow Warner Bros. to expand the budgets for the third and fourth films.
Granville also appeared as the saucy, mischievous daughter in the multiple Academy Award-nominated hit comedy Merrily We Live (Norman Z. McLeod, 1938), and starred as the title character in The Beloved Brat (Arthur Lubin, 1938). She also had Angels Wash Their Faces (Ray Enright, 1939) alongside Ann Sheridan and Ronald Reagan.
Vintage postcard.
Vintage postcard.
Andy Hardy's Blonde Trouble
In 1941, Bonita Granville signed with RKO Pictures and immediately found more substantial supporting roles in the crime drama The Glass Key (Frank Tuttle, 1942) and the drama Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942) starring Bette Davis, for which she was loaned out to Paramount and Warner Bros.Following her leading role in the action film Seven Miles from Alcatraz (1942), director Edward Dmytryk, soon cast her in RKO's World War II anti-Nazism film Hitler's Children (1943). It is known for its portrayal of brutality associated with the Hitler Youth, represented particularly by two young participants. The film was a commercial and critical success, becoming one of the studio's highest-grossing films of the year, and one of the highest-grossing for both RKO and 1943.
Despite her success, she was still offered few roles and had to work hard for them. The studio relegated her to B-films such as Youth Runs Wild (Mark Robson, 1944) and The Truth About Murder (Lew Landers, 1946). She continued to be loaned out to other studios. She was loaned to MGM for two Andy Hardy films with Mickey Rooney, Andy Hardy's Blonde Trouble (George B. Seitz, 1944) and Love Laughs at Andy Hardy (Willis Goldbeck, 1946), as well as a leading role in Song of the Open Road (S. Sylvan Simon, 1944) with Jane Powell.
At Universal, she played in the comedy The Beautiful Cheat (Charles Barton, 1945) and the comedy-drama Senorita from the West (Frank Strayer, 1945) with Allan Jones. For United Artists, she made the comedy Breakfast in Hollywood (Harold D. Schuster, 1946). Following being loaned out to Monogram Pictures for the ice-skating-themed Film Noir Suspense (Frank Tuttle, 1946) starring Barry Sullivan and former Olympic skater Belita, and the Film Noir The Guilty (John Reinhardt, 1947), Granville informally retired from films, only appearing in the comedy Strike It Rich (Lesley Selander, 1948) and the anti-communist drama Guilty of Treason (Felix E. Feist, 1950) starring Charles Bickford.
After marrying Texas oil millionaire Jack Wrather in 1947, Granville transitioned into producing with her husband on series such as Lassie (1954). She appeared in the film version of The Lone Ranger (Stuart Heisler, 1956) based on The Lone Ranger television series starring Clayton Moore and Jay Silverheels, and made her final screen appearance in a cameo role in The Legend of the Lone Ranger (William A. Fraker, 1981).
Retired from acting, she worked as a philanthropist and a businesswoman, most notably owning and operating the Disneyland Hotel and the Queen Mary in Long Beach, with her husband. Granville's marriage to Wrather lasted until Wrather died in 1984, shortly after the release of the film The Magic of Lassie (Don Chaffey, 1978), co-produced by Granville and starring Wrather's friend James Stewart. Bonita Granville died of lung cancer in a hospital in Santa Monica in 1988 at the age of 65. She was buried at the Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California.
British postcard in the Picturegoer Series, London, no. 1120. Photo: Radio.
Dutch postcard, no. 605. Photo: M.G.M. Jane Powell and Bonita Granville in Song of the Open Road (S. Sylvan Simon, 1944). Sent by mail in 1954.
French postcard by Editions P.I., Paris, no. 216. Photo: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
Sources: Burt A. Folkart (Los Angeles Times), Wikipedia (Dutch and English) and IMDb.
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