Picture the scene. It is 1937, and Barbara Stanwyck is thirty years old, a working actress with a decade of films behind her, a reputation for toughness, and a career that has never quite caught fire the way it should have. She has played con artists and chorus girls and working women, and she has played them brilliantly. But Hollywood still does not know what to do with her. She is too direct for the drawing room, too unsentimental for the weepie, too real for the glamour machine.
Then a part comes along that nobody thinks she should play, in a story everybody thinks is out of date, and she fights for it as if her life depends on it. Because it does. Stella Dallas would give her the first Academy Award nomination of her career, prove she could carry a great dramatic role, and change the way the entire industry saw her. It would also become the performance she treasured most, and the loss she regretted most, for the rest of her life.
A Story Hollywood Already Knew
Stella Dallas was not a new story. Olive Higgins Prouty’s novel had been a bestseller in the 1920s, and the producer Samuel Goldwyn had already filmed it once, as a silent picture in 1925. When Goldwyn decided to remake it with sound, most of his contemporaries laughed. The tale of a poor mill worker’s daughter who marries a wealthy executive, cannot fit into his world, and gives up her own daughter so the girl can have a better life, sounded hopelessly old-fashioned to a Hollywood chasing screwball comedy and gangster pictures.
Goldwyn did not care. He had bought the screen rights years earlier for what was then the impressive sum of fifteen thousand dollars, and he believed in the story’s power. It was, at its heart, a mother’s story, and a mother’s love was not a fashion. It did not go out of date. But Goldwyn needed the right woman to play Stella, and he did not believe Barbara Stanwyck was that woman.
It was an old story in another sense, too. Hollywood had been telling stories about mothers and sacrifice since the silent era, and audiences had wept over them for decades. What Goldwyn needed was not a new story but a new kind of Stella, one who felt like a real woman rather than a symbol. That was the part nobody in Hollywood could see yet, least of all the man who owned the picture.
The Reluctant Star
Goldwyn’s first choice for Stella was not Stanwyck at all. He thought she lacked the sex appeal the role demanded, and he favored other actresses, among them Ruth Chatterton, who turned the part down. The director, King Vidor, wanted Stanwyck, but Goldwyn insisted on a screen test, and Stanwyck, who had spent seven years proving herself in Hollywood, refused to make one. She had earned her standing. She would not audition like a beginner.
It took her agent, Zeppo Marx, and her old friend Joel McCrea to talk her around. McCrea, a frequent co-star and a man she trusted, persuaded her that the test was worth it, that the part was worth it. She relented, and her test was cut into a reel with forty-seven others. There was no doubt about it. Even Goldwyn had to agree: Stanwyck was Stella.
There was one more piece of luck in the casting. William Wyler had originally been lined up to direct, but he was delayed on loan to Warner Bros. for Jezebel, and Goldwyn hired King Vidor instead. Vidor, one of Hollywood’s great directors, understood exactly what Stanwyck could do, and he built the film around her. He trusted her directness, her refusal to soften a character, and he let her play Stella as a woman who is vulgar and loving in the same breath, ridiculous and magnificent at once.
Stella Dallas
Stella Martin is the daughter of a mill worker, a girl who schemes her way into marrying her father’s boss, Stephen Dallas, played by John Boles, a wealthy mill executive. It is a marriage of ambition, not love, and it cannot last. Stella’s loud clothes, her brash manners, her refusal to be anything but herself, embarrass her husband and, far worse, embarrass the daughter she adores, Laurel, played by the young Anne Shirley.
What makes Stanwyck’s performance extraordinary is that she never apologizes for Stella. She never winks at the audience, never signals that Stella is a fool to be pitied. Stella is loud because she is alive. She is vulgar because nobody ever taught her to be anything else. And she loves her daughter with a ferocity that is almost frightening, a love so complete that it will eventually demand the greatest sacrifice a mother can make.
The role also required Stanwyck to age some twenty years over the course of the film, from a young mill-town girl to a worn, middle-aged woman who has given everything away. She did it without vanity and without a trace of self-pity. Watch her in the film’s middle passages, when Stella begins to understand that she herself is the obstacle standing between her daughter and a better life, and you can see the knowledge arrive in her face, slowly, like weather. She does not play the tragedy. She plays a woman discovering the truth about herself, and it is devastating.
The Wedding in the Rain
The film’s ending is one of the most famous in all of Hollywood melodrama. Stella, having maneuvered events so that Laurel will live with Stephen and his new wife, Helen Morrison, played by Barbara O’Neil, gives her daughter up entirely. She invents a lover, the good-natured Ed Munn, played by Alan Hale, to convince Laurel that she does not need her anymore, and she watches from outside, in the rain, as Laurel is married in a grand ceremony she will never be part of.
Stanwyck plays the scene with almost no dialogue. She stands at the window in the dark, rain on her face, watching the daughter she has sacrificed everything for walk down the aisle toward a life Stella could never give her. And then she turns away, and she walks off into the night, and she is smiling. Smiling through tears, smiling because her daughter is safe, smiling because the sacrifice worked. It is one of the great final images in American film, and it belongs entirely to Stanwyck’s face.
Audiences wept. Critics praised her. The film was a commercial and critical success, and it did something no other film of hers had done: it made the industry see her not as a tough girl from the chorus line but as a great dramatic actress, capable of carrying the heaviest material Hollywood could offer. Stella Dallas had changed everything, and it had done so in a single scene, in the rain, outside a window.
Oscar Night, 1938
At the tenth Academy Awards, held on March 10, 1938, Stella Dallas received two nominations: Best Actress for Stanwyck and Best Supporting Actress for Anne Shirley. It was Stanwyck’s first Oscar nomination, the first formal recognition from her own industry that she was not merely a reliable working actress but one of the finest of her generation.
The competition was formidable. Irene Dunne was nominated for The Awful Truth. Greta Garbo was nominated for Camille, a film co-starring Stanwyck’s own husband-to-be, Robert Taylor. Janet Gaynor was nominated for A Star Is Born. And Luise Rainer, the previous year’s winner for The Great Ziegfeld, was nominated for The Good Earth. A Stanwyck win was widely predicted. On the night, Rainer won, for the second year in a row.
Stanwyck never forgot it. She would be nominated three more times, for Ball of Fire in 1941, for Double Indemnity in 1944, and for Sorry, Wrong Number in 1948, and she would never win a competitive Oscar. But those who knew her said the Stella Dallas loss was the one she regretted most, because she believed it was her best work. She was right. It was the performance in which everything she had learned, from the chorus line to the soundstage, came together at once.
What the Nomination Changed
The nomination changed Stanwyck’s career overnight, and it changed it permanently. Before Stella Dallas, she was a star, but a star of a particular kind: the tough, reliable, working-class heroine of pre-Code pictures and programmers. After Stella Dallas, she was something else. She was an actress the studios trusted with their most prestigious material, and the directors sought out for the roles that required depth, not just presence.
The films that followed prove it. In 1939 she starred in Golden Boy. In 1940 she made Remember the Night. In 1941 she delivered two of the great performances of her career, in The Lady Eve and Ball of Fire, the second of which earned her a second Oscar nomination. In 1944 she made Double Indemnity, the film that would define her for generations, and earned her third nomination. None of that happens without Stella Dallas. The nomination was the proof of range, the credential that turned a working star into a leading lady of the first rank.
It also changed the way she worked. She had always been professional, always prepared, but after Stella Dallas she carried a new authority on a set. She knew what she was capable of, and she knew the industry knew it too. She would never again have to fight for a screen test, or convince a producer she had the sex appeal for a part. The girl from the chorus line had become, in the industry’s own language, an Academy Award-nominated actress, and that phrase opened doors that talent alone never had.
The Role She Never Forgot
Stanwyck went on to play murderesses, con artists, ranch matriarchs, and queens of comedy. She won three Emmy Awards on television. She received an Honorary Oscar in 1982, and the American Film Institute ranked her the eleventh-greatest female star of classic American cinema. But when people asked her about her career, it was Stella Dallas she came back to. It was the role she felt she had done best, and the Oscar she felt she should have won.
There is something fitting about that. Stella Dallas is a film about a woman who gives everything away for someone she loves, and who is never thanked for it. Stanwyck gave the performance everything she had, and the Academy gave the prize to someone else. But the performance outlasted the prize. Luise Rainer’s win is a footnote now, a piece of Oscar trivia. Stanwyck’s Stella, standing in the rain outside her daughter’s wedding, is still there, still smiling through tears, still one of the greatest things any actress has ever done on screen.
That is what Stella Dallas changed. It did not win her an Oscar. It did something better. It proved, once and for all, that Barbara Stanwyck was not just a star. She was an artist. And it gave her a role that would follow her for the rest of her life, not as a regret, but as a standard, the performance against which she measured everything that came after. She never topped it, in her own estimation. Nobody else has either.