| Anne Revere | ||||||||||
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 from the Gentleman's Agreement trailer (1947) |
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| Born | June 25 1903 New York City, New York |
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| Died | December 18 1990 (aged 87) Locust Valley, New York |
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| Years active | 1934 - 1975 | |||||||||
| Spouse(s) | Samuel Rosen (m.1935) | |||||||||
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Anne Revere (June 25 1903–December 18 1990) was an Academy Award-winning American film actress.
Contents |
Early life
Born in New York, New York, Revere was a direct descendant of American Revolution figure Paul Revere. She made her Broadway acting debut in 1931 in The Great Barrington and followed this success with a role in Double Door.
Career
She made her film debut in the 1934 film version of the latter, and she quickly established herself as a character actress, specialising in worldly wise but frequently sharp tongued supporting roles. She received Oscar nominations as Best Supporting Actress for her world-weary yet sympathetic roles as a blue-class working mother in three roles in the 1940s - as the mother of Jennifer Jones in The Song of Bernadette (1943), Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet (1944) for which she won the award as a woman who had swum the English Channel as a teenager, and as the mother of Gregory Peck in Gentleman's Agreement (1947). She had previously worked with Peck on the 1944 film, The Keys of the Kingdom, in which she appeared as a Protestant missionary. Her last role of note was as the mother of Montgomery Clift in A Place in the Sun (1951), before her career was destroyed by the McCarthy-era witchhunts. Called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Revere pleaded the Fifth Amendment and she was blacklisted by the Hollywood movie studio bosses and her career ruined. For the rest of her life she maintained that the unsigned copy of a Communist Party registration card that was used as evidence of her party membership was a fake. Her role as Montgomery Clift's mother in A Place in the Sun was edited out of the final print of the film because of the "Red" scare.
| Awards | ||
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| Preceded by Ethel Barrymore for None But the Lonely Heart |
Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress 1945 for National Velvet |
Succeeded by Anne Baxter for The Razor's Edge |
Private life
With her husband, the playwright and director Samuel Rosen, Revere moved to New York where the couple ran an acting school, and Revere returned to Broadway. She won a Tony Award in 1961 for her role in Lillian Hellman's Toys in the Attic. Still an outsider in Hollywood, Revere was not considered for the film version which was played by Wendy Hiller. In her later years, she appeared in roles in television before her death from pneumonia in Locust Valley, New York. Among her soap opera roles were roles on The Edge of Night, Search for Tomorrow, and Ryan's Hope.
