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There’s only one actor in film history to have stolen scenes from Bette Davis, Jimmy Stewart, Marilyn Monroe, Ginger Rogers, Grace Kelly, Burt Lancaster, Rock Hudson, Barbara Stanwyck and Doris Day. That actor was a 5’1” middle-aged woman, and her name was Thelma Ritter.
Thelma Ritter didn’t arrive in Hollywood until she was 42 years old, when family friend, director George Seaton, asked her to make a single scene appearance in his 1947 movie Miracle on 34th Street. Although she didn’t even receive an on-screen credit, her performance was enough to leave an impression on mogul Darryl F. Zanuck, who cast her in another brief, uncredited role in the Jimmy Stewart vehicle Call Northside 777 (the first of three films Stewart and Ritter would make together) the following year.
Her career progressed steadily for the next few years, with Thelma Ritter making a very big impression in very small roles. By 1950, she’d built up enough of a reputation to have screenwriter Joseph L. Mankiewicz (brother of Herman) write a part for her in All About Eve. She earned her first Oscar nomination for her performance as Bette Davis’ maid, and would go on to garner five more, but she’d never actually come out on top; six nominations without a win still stands as a record today in the Best Supporting Actress category. (One imagines she’d have a lot to chat about with Glenn Close…)
In the four decades before she became a household name, Thelma Ritter had had a busy, full life, raising her kids and appearing on stages both prestigious and decidedly less so. One year, during the Depression, her and her husband’s only income came from prizes they won in radio competitions (all that experience inventing jingles for household goods eventually led to him becoming a successful ad man.). While she’d been interested in acting since she was a child, and had studied at the renowned American Academy of Dramatic Arts, by the time she made it in the movies, she’d been around the block many a time, and was not afraid to show it. (A newspaper article from 1963 described her as, “Like an old shoe—but with a lovely, lustrous shine”).
And more than anything else, that was what audiences responded to in her performances. Thelma Ritter, who kept her thick Brooklyn accent throughout her movie career, was repeatedly cast in the working class roles of maids, nurses, secretaries and mothers. She was the audience surrogate in the truest sense of the term; a recognizably real, lived-in face striding confidently through a forest of perfect glamazons and Greek gods. She made you feel sure that, while the stars had been living their lives in front of us, she’d been living her own just as vividly off-screen.
Her best roles really emphasized her hard-earned street smarts. In 1953’s Pickup on South Street, she plays Moe: a stool pigeon whose one ambition in life is to earn enough money to avoid an anonymous burial in Potter’s Field. Even though she makes her living by turning them in, Moe’s well-respected by her fellow down-and-outs. “Moe’s alright…she’s gotta eat,” acknowledges Richard Widmark’s pickpocket Skip, whose location Moe ultimately refuses to divulge to the bad guys, at the cost of her life. The Samuel Fuller film argues that there is, in fact, honor among thieves, and Ritter’s Moe is the face of it.
In Rear Window, released the following year, Thelma Ritter is Stella—charged with nursing Jimmy Stewart’s injured photographer L.B Jefferies back to health after an accident on the job. At first, she is dismissive of the curtain-twitching Jeffries’ theories about his neighbor’s potential murder. (“The New York state sentence for a peeping Tom is six months in the workhouse…and they got no windows in the workhouse!”) Soon though, she’s become thoroughly invested in the mystery, to the extent where she’s disturbing Jeffries and his girlfriend Lisa (Grace Kelly) with her graphic theories as to hypothetical corpse disposal methods.
Ritter’s working-classness was among the most important parts of her professional identity—so much so that it became casting shorthand. In 1953’s Titanic, her character on board that fateful ship is introduced when an officer is walking around the deck looking for “the Widener maid.” He stops and gives her a long, appraising stare, after which she says, “Well don’t look at me—I got so many maids, some of the maids are taking care of the maids!” When he walks away, she comments to her companion, “Can’t say I blame the poor fella—I just haven’t got the kind of face that goes with the bank roll.” Although Ritter does appear throughout the rest of the movie, she’s really little more than an extra from that point on—the joke of her being cast against type being her only real function.
In another class-focused movie, 1951’s The Mating Season, Ritter’s part was far more substantive; in fact, it might well have been the closest she got to a leading role in her whole film career. She played Ellen McNulty, the owner of a failing hamburger joint, who heads to live with her son Val (John Lund) for a while, not knowing he’s about to marry Maggie (Gene Tierney), the daughter of an ambassador. A series of class-anxiety related convolutions lead to Maggie believing her mother-in-law is actually her new maid. Though billed below younger co-stars Tierney and Lund, Ritter is the heart of Mitchell Leisen’s unjustly forgotten comedy. Her straightforward lovability is the sun around which all the other players orbit; the way they react to her is the way we determine their merit.
Thelma Ritter was almost always a benign presence, warm and conciliatory, but in Birdman of Alcatraz she proved more than capable of malice, playing the mother of Burt Lancaster’s titular prisoner, with whom she had a quasi-Oedipal relationship. When her son forms a romantic bond with a woman who’s been a frequent visitor, later marrying her, Ritter’s utter chilliness (“If you follow my advice, you’ll get rid of her”) is jolting. She could certainly play nasty when necessary, and gained her sixth and final Oscar nomination to prove it.
Thelma Ritter’s reputation has been somewhat unfairly caricaturized over the years. In an interview with Vulture about the nature of the term “character actor,” Margo Martindale (or to give her full, BoJack Horseman-coined title, “Character Actress Margo Martindale”) surmised: “It came from the old studio system where you had your list of Marjorie Main and Thelma Ritter and those gals who did one thing and they did it as, [impersonating]: Hello everybody!”
Ritter was indeed, more often than not, tasked with portraying a “type,” but you could say the same of Cary Grant and his suave heroes, or Bette Davis and her arch heroines. Thelma Ritter may not have been a chameleon, but she could evoke the tough realities of life far more quickly, vividly and endearingly than anyone around. Ritter was perennially called upon to give her working-class women depth and texture, and in a fraction of the screentime of her leading counterparts. Perennially, she excelled.
While Ritter was ever the wise, working-class woman of the world, her co-star in With A Song in My Heart was the perpetual spunky best friend. Next week: Una Merkel.
Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can read her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Podcast Review, and Paste.