Jean Arthur (October 17, 1900 – June 19, 1991) was an Oscar-nominated American actress and a major film star of the 1930s and 1940s. She remains, arguably, the quintessential female exemplar of the screwball comedy genre. "No one was more closely identified with the screwball comedy than Jean Arthur. So much was she part of it, so much was her star personality defined by it, that the screwball style itself seems almost unimaginable without her."

Arthur is best known as the heroine in three Frank Capra films: Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, You Can't Take It With You, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

Arthur was born Gladys Georgianna Greene in Plattsburgh, New York to Johanna Augusta Nelson and Hubert Sidney Greene. She lived off and on in Westbrook, Maine from 1908 to 1915 while her father worked at Lamson Studios in Portland, Maine as a photographer. The product of a nomadic childhood, Arthur also lived at times in Jacksonville, Florida; Schenectady, New York; and, during a portion of her high school years, in the Washington Heights neighborhood of upper Manhattan. She came from a family of three older brothers. Her maternal grandparents were immigrants from Norway who settled in the American West. She reputedly took her stage name from two of her greatest heroes, Joan of Arc (Jeanne d'Arc) and King Arthur.

Presaging many of her later film roles, she worked as a stenographer on Bond Street in lower Manhattan during World War I.

Discovered by Fox Film Studios while she was doing commercial modeling in New York City in the early 1920s, Arthur debuted in the silent film Cameo Kirby (1923), directed by John Ford, and made a few low-budget silent westerns and short comedies. She was selected as one of the WAMPAS Baby Stars in 1929, but she became stuck in ingénue roles. It was her distinctive, throaty voice – in addition to some stage training on Broadway in the early 1930s – that helped made her a star in the talkies.

In 1935, at age 34, she starred opposite Edward G. Robinson in the gangster farce The Whole Town's Talking, also directed by Ford, and her popularity began to rise. By then, her hair, naturally brunette throughout the silent film portion of her career, was bleached blonde and would stay that way. Like Claudette Colbert, she was famous for maneuvering to be photographed and filmed almost exclusively from the left; both actresses felt that their left was their best side, and worked hard to keep it in the fore. In fact, producer Harry Cohn is reputed to have described Jean Arthur's imbalanced profile as "one side angel, the other side horse."

The turning point in Jean Arthur's career came when she was chosen by director Frank Capra to star in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. Capra had spotted her in a daily rush from the film Whirlpool in 1934 and convinced Columbia Studios head Harry Cohn to sign her for his next film as a tough newspaperwoman who falls in love with a country bumpkin millionaire. Arthur costarred in three celebrated 1930s Capra films: her role opposite the millionaire bumpkin Gary Cooper in 1936 in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town made her a star, while her fame was cemented with You Can't Take It With You (1938) and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington in 1939, both with James Stewart. She was reteamed with Cooper, playing Calamity Jane in Cecil B. DeMille's The Plainsman (1936), and appeared as a working girl, her typical role, in Mitchell Leisen's 1937 screwball comedy Easy Living opposite Ray Milland. So strong was her box office appeal by 1939 that she was one of four finalists that year for the role of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind; the film's producer, David O. Selznick, had briefly romanced Arthur in the late 1920s when they both were with Paramount Pictures.

She continued to star in films such as Howard Hawks' Only Angels Have Wings in 1939, with love interest Cary Grant, 1942's The Talk of the Town, directed by George Stevens (also with Grant), and again for Stevens as a government clerk in 1943's The More the Merrier, for which Jean Arthur was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress (losing to Jennifer Jones in The Song of Bernadette). As a result of being in the doghouse with studio boss Harry Cohn, her fee for The Talk of the Town (1942) was only $50,000 while her male co-stars Grant and Ronald Colman received upwards of $100,000 each. Arthur remained Columbia's top star until the mid-1940s, when she left the studio and Rita Hayworth took over as the studio's reigning queen. Stevens famously called her "one of the greatest comediennes the screen has ever seen", while Capra credited her as "my favorite actress" .

Arthur "retired" when her contract with Columbia Pictures expired in 1944. She reportedly ran through the studio's streets, shouting "I'm free, I'm free!" For the next several years, she turned down virtually all film offers, the two exceptions being Billy Wilder's A Foreign Affair (1948), in which she played a congresswoman and rival of Marlene Dietrich, and as a homesteader's wife in the classic Western Shane (1953), which turned out to be the biggest box-office hit of her career. The latter was her final film.

Arthur's post-retirement work in theater was intermittent, somewhat curtailed by her longstanding shyness and discomfort about her chosen profession. Capra claimed she vomited in her dressing room between scenes, yet emerged each time to perform a flawless take. According to John Oller's biography Jean Arthur: The Actress Nobody Knew (1997), Arthur developed a kind of stage fright punctuated with bouts of psychosomatic illnesses. A prime example was in 1945, when she was cast in the lead of the Garson Kanin play Born Yesterday. Her nerves and insecurity got the better of her and she left the production before it reached Broadway, opening the door for Judy Holliday to take the part.

Arthur did score a major triumph on Broadway in 1950, starring in a stage revival of Peter Pan playing the Eternal Boy when she was almost 50. She tackled the role of her namesake, Joan of Arc, in a 1954 stage production of George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan, but she left the play after a nervous breakdown and battles with director Harold Clurman.

In 1966, the extremely reclusive Arthur tentatively returned to show business as an attorney on a TV sitcom, The Jean Arthur Show, which was cancelled mid-season by CBS after only 11 episodes.

In 1967, she was coaxed back to Broadway to appear as a midwestern spinster who falls in with a group of hippies in the play The Freaking Out of Stephanie Blake. William Goldman, in his book The Season reconstructed the disastrous production, which eventually closed during previews when Arthur refused to go on.

Arthur next decided to teach drama, first at Vassar College and then the North Carolina School of the Arts. While living in North Carolina she made front page news by being arrested and tossed in jail for trespassing on a neighbor's property to console a dog she felt was being mistreated. An animal lover her entire life, Arthur said she trusted them more than people.

She turned down the role of the lady missionary in Lost Horizon (1973), the unsuccessful musical remake of the 1937 film of the same name. At the Yale Law School Film Society weekend with Capra in 1972, she attended a small afternoon symposium at his invitation. He urged her to stay for the screening that night, and assured her the audience would be delighted and overwhelmingly enthusiastic. She declined because, she said, she had to go home and feed her cats.

In 1975, the Broadway hit play First Monday in October, about the first female Supreme Court justice, was written especially with Arthur in mind, but once again, she succumbed to extreme stage fright and quit the production shortly into its out-of-town run in Cleveland. She then retired for good, retreating to her ocean home in Carmel, California, steadfastly refusing interviews until her resistance was broken down by the author of a book on her one-time director Capra (she once famously said that she’d rather have her throat slit than do an interview).

Arthur is portrayed by Vicki Belmonte in the TV film The Scarlett O'Hara War (1980).

Her first marriage, to photographer Julian Anker in 1928, was annulled after one day. She married producer Frank Ross Jr. in 1932. They divorced in 1949. Arthur did not have any children.

Jean Arthur died from heart failure at the age of 90. Her ashes were scattered at sea near Carmel-by-the-Sea, California. She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6331 Hollywood Blvd. The Jean Arthur Atrium was her gift to the Monterey Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California.

Upon her death film reviewer Charles Champlin wrote the following in the Los Angeles Times:

To at least one teenager in a small town (though I’m sure we were a multitude), Jean Arthur suggested strongly that the ideal woman could be — ought to be — judged by her spirit as well as her beauty…. The notion of the woman as a friend and confidante, as well as someone you courted and were nuts about, someone whose true beauty was internal rather than external, became a full-blown possibility as we watched Jean Arthur.

In January 2007, Turner Classic Movies aired a 17-film tribute to Jean Arthur calling her "the quintessential comedic leading lady."

*Cameo Kirby (1923) *The Temple of Venus (1923) *Wine of Youth (1924) *Biff Bang Buddy (1924) *Fast and Fearless (1924) *Bringin' Home the Bacon (1924) *Thundering Romance (1924) *Travelin' Fast (1924) *Seven Chances (1925) *The Drug Store Cowboy (1925) *The Fighting Smile (1925) *Tearin' Loose (1925) *A Man of Nerve (1925) *The Hurricane Horseman (1925) *Thundering Through (1925) *Under Fire (1926) *The Roaring Rider (1926) *Born to Battle (1926) *The Fighting Cheat (1926) *Double Daring (1926) *Lightning Bill (1926) *Twisted Triggers (1926) *The Cowboy Cops (1926) *The College Boob (1926) *The Block Signal (1926) *Winners of the Wilderness (1927) *Husband Hunters (1927) *The Broken Gate (1927) *Horse Shoes (1927) *The Poor Nut (1927) *The Masked Menace (1927) *Flying Luck (1927) *Wallflowers (1928) *Easy Come, Easy Go (1928) *Warming Up (1928) *Brotherly Love (1928) *Sins of the Fathers (1928) *The Canary Murder Case (1929) *Stairs of Sand (1929) *The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu (1929) *The Greene Murder Case (1929)

*The Saturday Night Kid (1929) *Street of Chance (1930) *Young Eagles (1930) *Paramount on Parade (1930) *The Return of Dr. Fu Manchu (1930) *Danger Lights (1930) *The Silver Horde (1930) *The Gang Buster (1931) *The Virtuous Husband (1931) *The Lawyer's Secret (1931) *Ex-Bad Boy (1931) *Get That Venus (1933) *The Past of Mary Holmes (1933) *Whirlpool (1934) *The Most Precious Thing in Life (1934) *The Defense Rests (1934) *The Whole Town's Talking (1935) *Party Wire (1935) *Public Hero #1 (1935) *Diamond Jim (1935) *The Public Menace (1935) *If You Could Only Cook (1935) *Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) *The Ex-Mrs. Bradford (1936) *Adventure in Manhattan (1936) *The Plainsman (1936) *More Than a Secretary (1936) *History Is Made at Night (1937) *Easy Living (1937) *You Can't Take It with You (1938) *Only Angels Have Wings (1939) *Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) *Too Many Husbands (1940) *Arizona (1940) *The Devil and Miss Jones (1941) *The Talk of the Town (1942) *The More the Merrier (1943) *A Lady Takes a Chance (1943) *The Impatient Years (1944) *A Foreign Affair (1948) *Shane (1953)

*Somebody Lied (1923) *Spring Fever (1923) *The Powerful Eye (1924) *Eight-Cylinder Bull (1926) *The Mad Racer (1926) *Ridin' Rivals (1926) *Hello Lafayette (1927) *Bigger and Better Blondes (1927) *Screen Snapshots Series 9, No. 24 (1930)

;Notes

;Bibliography

* Capra, Frank. Frank Capra, The Name Above the Title: An Autobiography. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1971. ISBN 0-30680-771-8. * Harvey, James. Romantic Comedy in Hollywood: From Lubitsch to Sturges. New York: Knopf, 1987. ISBN 0-39450-339-2. * Oller, John. Jean Arthur: The Actress Nobody Knew. New York: Limelight Editions, 1997. ISBN 0-87910-278-0.

* * * * Turner Classic Movies "Star of the Month" Profile * Jean Arthur biographical sketch on Find-A-Grave *Allmovie bio *Lengthy article on Jean Arthur