'Aline MacMahon' by John Strangeland
Even compulsive TCM viewers aren’t likely to recognize the name Aline MacMahon. Film historian John Strangeland thinks that’s a shame. In his new biography of the actor, Strangeland reviews her career, cut short by the blacklist of suspected Communists after World War II. Before then, she played a few leading roles in Hollywood but was mostly known as a sad-eyed supporting actress—for which she received an Oscar nomination for her role in Dragon Seed (1944).
MacMahon started on stage in New York and came to Hollywood in the ‘30s along with the wave of new talent for talking pictures. She gave some outstanding performances, literally standing out from cast members as perhaps the first Method actor in American pictures. Before John Garfield, Marlon Brando, Lee J. Cobb and Rod Steiger, and even before Lee Strasburg’s Group Theater, MacMahon had been trained in the Method of unlocking an actor’s inner emotions to empathize with their characters. Richard Boleslavsky, a pupil of the Method’s founder Konstantyn Stanislavsli, established the American Laboratory Theatre in rural New York state as a workshop in the Method. MacMahon was there, one of “the first students anywhere outside of Russia to learn the modern tenets of acting.”
MacMahon was also concerned about the injustices of American society. Unlike many actors, artists and intellectuals who attended a few meetings and signed a few petitions organized by the American Communist Party during the Great Depression, MacMahon drew close to the party without, according to Strangeland, quite getting around to joining. Her ambiguities weren’t enough to prevent her from being blacklisted during the early Cold War.
Her filmmaking career cut short, and banned from Broadway and television, she picked up only small parts during the McCarthy era and sustained her acting through regional theater. By the time the blacklist was lifted, she was in her sixties and relegated to playing older women in supporting roles. Working from a trove of her letters, Strangeland concludes that she “refuse to be the victim of her own story. Typically, her anger at McCarthyism was almost entirely focused on the injustices visited on others.” She outlived her devoted husband, her family and friends, dying in 1991 at age 92. Fortunately, she invested well earlier in life and was able to live in modest style in her New York apartment through the end.
Aline MacMahon: Hollywood, the Blacklist, and the Birth of Method Acting is published by University Press of Kentucky.
