Le vandale

When Frances Farmer was a drama student at the University of Washington she won a scholarship to visit Russia and watch the Moscow Art Theater headed by the great actor and director, Konstantin Stanislavski. When that Russian company first came to tour the United States in the 1920s, the truthfulness and expressivity of the acting so impressed many of America's best young actors that they eventually formed The Group Theater (1931-1940),modeling their ensemble work on it. In 1937 The Group Theater invited Frances Farmer, a non-member of the company, to play the female lead in Clifford Odets' new play "Golden Boy." At the time it was thought by many that the sole reason for the invitation was because Farmer was a beautiful movie star whose presence would boost box office. Today anyone who sees her remarkable work in the dual roles of Lotta in "Come and Get It" (1936) will recognize that not only was she dazzling beautiful, she was also dazzling real and painfully truthful --a true actress in the Stanislavski tradition. No wonder Howard Hawks said she was the best actress he had ever worked with in his long career.