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Eve Arden

Cast

“I’ve worked with a lot of great glamorous girls in movies and the theater. And I’ll admit, I’ve often thought it would be wonderful to be a femme fatale. But then I’d always come back to thinking that if they only had what I’ve had – a family, real love, an anchor – they would have been so much happier during all the hours when the marquees and the floodlights are dark.”

Biography

Little Eunice Quedens’ first brush with the performing arts came at age seven, when she won a WCTU medal for her recital of the pro-temperance poem “No Kicka My Dog.” After graduating from high school, she became a professional actress on the California stock company circuit. Still using her given name, she played a blonde seductress in the 1929 Columbia talkie Song of Love then joined a touring repertory theater. After another brief film appearance in 1933’s Dancing Lady, she was urged by a producer to change her name for professional purposes. Allegedly inspired by a container of Elizabeth Arden cold cream, Eunice Quedens reinvented herself as Eve Arden. Several successful appearances in the annual Ziegfeld Follies followed, and in 1937 Arden returned to films as a young character actress. From Stage Door (1937) onward, she was effectively typecast as the all-knowing witheringly sarcastic “best friend” who seldom got the leading man but always got the best lines. Her film roles in the 1940s ranged from such typical assignments as sophisticated magazine editor “Stonewall” Jackson in Cover Girl (1944) to such hilariously atypical performances as athletic Russian sniper Natalia Moskoroff in The Doughgirls (1944). In 1945, she earned an Oscar nomination for her portrayal of Joan Crawford’s sardonic but sympathetic business partner in Mildred Pierce. In July of 1948, she launched the popular radio situation comedy Our Miss Brooks, earning a place in the hearts of schoolteachers (and sitcom fans) everywhere with her award-winning portrayal of long-suffering but ebullient high school teacher Connie Brooks. Our Miss Brooks was transferred to television in 1952, running five successful seasons. Less successful was the 1957 TVer The Eve Arden Show, in which the star played authoress Liza Hammond. This failure was neutralized by her subsequent stage tours in such plays as Auntie Mame and Hello, Dolly! and her well-received film appearances in Anatomy of a Murder (1959) and Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1960). In 1967, she returned to TV to co-star with Kaye Ballard on the chucklesome The Mothers-in-Law which lasted two years. And in 1978, she became a favorite of a new generation with her performance as Principal McGee in the phenomenally successful film version of Broadway’s Grease. In 1985, Eve Arden came out with her autobiography, The Three Phases of Eve. —allmovie guide

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Films on MUBI

Grease 2

Under the Rainbow

The Strongest Man in the World

The Dark at the Top of the Stairs

Anatomy of a Murder

We're Not Married

Three Husbands

Goodbye, My Fancy

Tea for Two

My Dream Is Yours

The Lady Takes a Sailor

One Touch of Venus

The Unfaithful

The Voice of the Turtle

My Reputation

Mildred Pierce

Cover Girl

Hit Parade of 1943

Ziegfeld Girl

That Uncertain Feeling

Bedtime Story

Manpower

Slightly Honorable

Comrade X

At the Circus

Eternally Yours

Letter of Introduction

Stage Door

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your fiend mr. jones

28Sep10

One of her earliest film appearances was in “Stage Door”, where she manages to be more interesting than Katherine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, Lucille Ball and the young Ann Miller. She is, in almost every film she is in, the smartest one in the room or certainly the one with the smartest lines. Known from radio and television as “Our Miss Brooks” (a show so popular that it was made into a movie while the show was still running), she made the character of the high school English teacher Connie Brooks so ingrained into the cultural perception of her, that until her death she was still asked to speak at teaching colleges and educator conferences (It is also why she was cast as the principal in the “Grease” movies). And, in the end, being the “smartass best friend”, the role she most often played, became in vogue again as Carrie Fisher (who later became the much-smarter writer of the lines for the best friend) and Rosie O’Donnell (who became someone the best friend would make smartass remarks about) would find out. Janeane Garofalo would refer to her part in “Reality Bites” as “the Eve Arden part”, a line almost worthy of Arden herself.

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