Word: barbara
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...Barbara," reported another teacher, "seems completely unaware of how disturbing an influence she is." The perturbation was caused largely among the male student body. One evening during Barbara's second year, Putney's headmistress discovered one of the boys kissing Barbara. She wrote to Norman suggesting that he would do well to send his daughter to another school. Andrebrook, an all-girl establishment as free of temptation as a French convent school, was recommended. Norman agreed, but his daughter persuaded him to let her have a run first in greener pastures...
...June of 1940, Barbara joined Actor-Producer Alexander Kirkland's summer stock at Clinton, Conn, as an apprentice. Between walk-on appearances and rounds of scene painting, she studied the Stanislavsky acting technique with Coach Lee Strasberg. "We'd be teapots, poison ivy and other things, for practice," says Barbara, "and I just loved it." She played bits with Ethel Barrymore, Sinclair Lewis and other visiting stars, and at the end of the season she even got a fat part of her own-Amy in Little Women. Says Barbara: "I got damn good notices...
Blonde Apprentice. Barbara had been more favorably noticed as Amy than even she suspected, and before the end of her first semester at Andrebrook, Producer Kirkland offered her a part in a real Broadway show. On Feb. n, 1941 Barbara made her Broadway debut as an amiably nitwitted ingenue in an inconsequential piece called Out of the Frying...
...Hell." Director Kazan and many another of Barbara's friends in New York urged her to stay away from pictures. "She was not a commodity, a can of peas," says Kazan. "She was an actress." But Actress Bel Geddes had at last been granted a wish completely on her own terms. She was not to be turned off. "I wanted desperately to be a movie star," she admits today. She went to the coast determined, often quite touchily (as in the matter of dressing rooms), to be treated like a movie star. The one thing she could...
...calls them "sensitive." For one reason or another, a "sensitive actress" will refuse to do a striptease, or be hit by a custard pie, or perform other trifling tasks often deemed necessary to her art. Helen Hayes had been an outstanding sensitive in her brief flings at Hollywood. Barbara was plainly another. She met all the requirements of the star's life with open rebellion. Even the barbecue grill at her home annoyed her because it was so typically Hollywood. Besides, she says, "I hated being under contract, hated always being told what to do next...