Two on Margaret Sullavan

“’I know every movie of hers.  In her last movie, NO SAD SONGS FOR ME, she has a child and husband whom she adores, and Viveca Lindfors plays a woman who is teaching the child the piano, and Margaret Sullavan arranges a romance between her husband and Viveca, so that he won’t be alone, without telling them she’s dying of cancer, of course...So it’s self-sacrifice on two levels.  But you see, the way she acted, there was a toughness in her that prevented any of her movies from becoming really silly.  I can remember, when she looked in the camera, to the doctor who was telling her, and she said, “You mean—cancer?”’  He gasped in a hoarse voice.  ‘You know, she always spoke like that.  Something in her voice.  So I wrote a song, because she died of everything.  She died of rifle shot, she died of a machine gun, she died in childbirth, she tied of TB.  But she never died of the same thing twice, and I swear it was in her contract.’”  Stephen Sondheim from STEPHEN SONDHEIM, A LIFE by Meryle Secrest


"Margaret Sullavan was a star whose deathbed scenes were one of the great joys of the Golden Age of Movies.  Sullavan never simply kicked the bucket.  She made speeches, as she lay dying; and she was so incredibly noble that she made you feel like an absolute twerp for continuing to live out your petty life after she'd ridden on ahead, to the accompaniment of the third movement of Brahm’s First Symphony."  Gore Vidal