The jezebel swagger of Miriam Hopkins

If she is known at all today, the controversial Miriam Hopkins is usually remembered as the troublemaking, diminutive blonde who made two films with her hated rival Bette Davis – The Old Maid (1939) and Old Acquaintance (1943) – and destroyed her own career because of her overbearing, attention-seeking behaviour. “Miriam used and, I must give her credit, knew every trick in the book,” Davis wrote in her autobiography The Lonely Life. “Once in a two-shot favoring both of us, her attempts to upstage me almost collapsed the couch we were both sitting on.” Even when she was making her best film, Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise (1932), and playing opposite a good friend, Kay Francis, Hopkins was still trying to hog the spotlight, making her co-star eat more than two dozen eggs before Lubitsch could get a take with Francis’s face fully visible for the camera.

Considering her work habits, it’s obvious why Hopkins’s best scenes are often based on pure hate between two people. Laurence Olivier gives the film performance of his life as George Hurstwood in William Wyler’s Carrie (1952), and there is no more electric confrontation on film than the scene where Hurstwood bursts in on his reclining wife Julia (Hopkins) in her boudoir and insists on getting his freedom. It lasts a little over a minute, and Olivier is like a caged beast stalking around the room, but Hopkins meets his energy, matches it and even at one point tops it when she verbally interrupts him. Wyler was one of the few directors who would cast the actress post-1943, feeling that whatever headaches she caused on set were worth it for what he got on screen.

Hopkins was born in Savannah, Georgia in 1902, and her Southern accent sometimes asserts itself on screen, so that words like “player” would become “play-yuh”, or “care” as “ca-yuh.” She went on the stage as a young girl and worked all through the 1920s on Broadway, leading a bohemian life and favouring the company of writers and intellectuals. Hopkins eventually racked up four husbands, including director Anatole Litvak, all of whom she exhausted. As an older woman she didn’t like to talk about her career, but she gleefully spoke about her many lovers to anyone who would listen. “When I can’t sleep, I don’t count sheep, I count lovers,” Hopkins said. “And when I reach 38 or 39, I’m fast asleep.”

She signed with Paramount and made her first feature film Fast and Loose (1930) at their Astoria Studios in New York. In that debut, which boasts dialogue by Preston Sturges, Hopkins’s second line is, “Oh, shut up!” Her risky appeal in the film is based on a kind of triumphant obnoxiousness; she comes across like a spoiled, exhibitionistic child – always fluttering her little claw-like hands to hypnotise her audience – who has charmed everyone since birth and sees no reason not to constantly indulge herself. Time and again, in this first film and the films to come, Hopkins naturally falls into attitudes of disgust and disdain, opening her mouth as wide as she can so that it looks defiantly ugly. She gets her biggest laughs in Fast and Loose by acting as unsympathetic, selfish and bitchy as possible.

The following year, again at Astoria, Hopkins made The Smiling Lieutenant, her first of three films with Lubitsch, her ideal director. Lubitsch had performed in his own German silent films, and he was famous for acting out a scene himself before letting the actors do it for him. Most actresses would watch him and then adapt his style to make it lighter for themselves, but here Hopkins is obviously taking the rather heavy, grotesque movements and attitudes Lubitsch gave her to work with and making them even more grotesque, even weirder. Playing a dowdy princess with braids over her ears, she consistently makes this girl drippier and odder than might be expected, committing to goonish physical behaviour and executing it with knife-like precision.

Out in California, Hopkins tested for and won the part of Rosie, a nightclub singer, in Marion Gering’s 24 Hours (1931). The frizzy-haired, alarming Rosie is first seen almost yelling a song to her male customers, aggressively, even freakishly. This is a morbid woman, a drunk and a mess, speaking of “dead things” and striding around bra-less in a black-and-gold spangled dress. Hopkins’s behaviour in 24 Hours is spectacularly un-ladylike, unrefined and downright anti-social, and it seems like she feels a kinship with this lost, damned character. When a murderous lover breaks into Rosie’s room, Hopkins suggests that this woman welcomes her own death. This little-seen film shows just how far Hopkins was willing to go in portraying uncomfortable feelings, and it remains one of the most disturbing performances she ever gave.

The same year Hopkins unleashed her insolent, sadomasochistic sexuality as Ivy Pearson in Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), briefly appearing topless under the covers in bed in her first scene with Fredric March’s Doctor, before offering up her pliant, pale blondness to the sexual violence of Hyde. Though her cockney accent is hopeless, Hopkins manages to reach Ingmar Bergman-like levels of intensity in her scenes of hate with Hyde. But after that Paramount stuck her in three programme films before Lubitsch rescued her to be in his – and her – masterpiece, Trouble in Paradise.

In that perfect movie, Hopkins plays Lily, a libidinous fake in gold lamé who is most turned on by larceny. Lily’s kleptomania is a sexy excuse for Hopkins’s habitually overactive hands, and her Southern-belle volubility is harnessed to some of the best dialogue any actor ever had (courtesy of screenwriter Samson Raphaelson). Lubitsch allows Hopkins to do outlandish takes and inventively eccentric line readings as Lily flits and chatters away; only the prospect of sex and its afterglow slows this woman’s racing motor down to a languid crawl.

This is a role that really highlights Hopkins’s barbed humour, especially when she says to her lover Gaston (Herbert Marshall), “I want you as a crook. I love you as a crook. I worship you as a crook! Steal, swindle, rob! Oh, but don’t become one of those worthless, good-for-nothing gigolos!” Lily is amoral, but she has her own odd standards, and Hopkins is sophisticated enough to relish the joke of that and technically skilled enough to build this speech up with comic bursts of vocal hysteria while amply hinting at the sexual hunger underneath. In Trouble in Paradise – and all her best work – Hopkins is as far from being a heroine, or a ‘nice’ person, as you can get, and she reveals why in this film, beautifully handling the shift to drama when the seemingly heartless Lily is heartbroken over her lover’s infidelity. Robbing a safe, Lily says, “This is all that’s real: money, cash,” and Hopkins harshly rasps out that word “cash” like she’s setting it ablaze.

But even greater risk-taking was to come. In The Story of Temple Drake (1933), based on William Faulkner’s novel Sanctuary, Hopkins offers one of the all-time best portrayals of masochistic female sexuality; only Claire Bloom in George Cukor’s The Chapman Report (1962) even comes close to what Hopkins dares in this movie. She’s more emotionally fluid here, vulnerable and unguarded, as a well-bred girl with a wild streak who delights in inspiring and then frustrating male lust until her life descends into a Patty Hearst-like sexual nightmare after being raped by the sadistic Trigger (Jack La Rue). After the rape Temple becomes practically catatonic, and Hopkins powerfully conveys this woman’s debilitating sense of shame about her own sexual desires by upsettingly draining herself of all her usual nervous energy. She is travelling in very murky psychological waters here, and she handles this difficult role with the same kind of precision that marked her outré comedy playing for Lubitsch.

She acted a third time for Lubitsch in a free adaptation of Noël Coward’s play Design for Living (1933), where she has a role that was close to the real Hopkins – an adventurous, critical girl who likes to loll about on couches in inviting poses of sexual laziness while refusing to choose between two men she fancies, insisting instead on a ménage à trois. Yet again, she gets her biggest laughs in Design for Living when she projects arrogance, boredom or disdain, and she brings the same kind of prickly sexual charge to King Vidor’s The Stranger’s Return (1933). Working out her Paramount contract, Hopkins was at her strident, zesty best opposite Bing Crosby in She Loves Me Not (1934), where she dresses in male drag.

In 1934, Hopkins signed with producer Samuel Goldwyn, which proved to be a mistake, but she had one final hurrah in Mamoulian’s Becky Sharp (1935), an adaptation of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair that was the first three-strip Technicolor feature. Hopkins’s star turn as a ferociously misanthropic social climber tears all sentiments to tatters. She was well cast (perhaps too well cast, according to detractors), and her relentlessly high-pressure performance is a love-it-or-hate-it proposition that can be seen as admirably single-minded or fearsomely one-note. In a late scene, Hopkins’s Becky faces down a jeering audience by jeering right back at them, and this reflected the actress’s own position at this turning point in her career.

Goldwyn tried to muzzle Hopkins into more ladylike roles, but this didn’t work, least of all in Wyler’s These Three (1936), a version of Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour where the plot’s lesbianism was changed to heterosexual dalliance, effectively neutering Hopkins’s role of Martha Dobie so that she doesn’t get to do the play’s searing confession and suicide scene. Hopkins is perfectly capable in These Three, but it was perverse to choose her to do a study in repression when she’s one of the least repressed actresses of all time.

Fourth-rate dud films began to accumulate for her, hard to see now and easy to forget once seen, but Lady with Red Hair (1940) at least features a tasty ham-acting contest between Hopkins and Claude Rains. She was reduced by her two film bouts with Davis, neither of which flatters her, particularly Old Acquaintance, where she does a kind of cruel Miriam Hopkins impersonation, all tiresome flounces, affected laughter, hysterical speeches and uncontrolled lifts of her eyebrows. Hopkins was too specialised and peculiar a performer to last for very long as a star in movies, especially after age began to coarsen her appearance and her acting style, and her own insecurities and ego made her too difficult to work with.

She went back to the stage, until Wyler gave her a plum character role as a merry widow in The Heiress (1949), letting her rise to the very different styles of Montgomery Clift and Ralph Richardson. After that film and Carrie, she was largely restricted to increasingly undisciplined TV and stage appearances before returning to The Children’s Hour (1961) – again for Wyler, again thanklessly – this time in the part of the brutish aunt. Then came Arthur Penn’s The Chase (1965) where – as a mother fighting for her son – she screams and screams at Marlon Brando until it seems like she’s really screaming just to make sure everyone notices she’s still around.

Her last film was Comeback (1970), aka Savage Intruder, aka Hollywood Horror House; under any title, it’s the most outrageous of any of the ‘grande dame guignol’ films of the time that cast ageing actresses in slasher exploitation. Hopkins plays a faded star who watches old Miriam Hopkins films on TV and proclaims, “Isn’t she marvellous?” At the age of 68, she has a hot love affair with a younger man and even appears in a brief semi-nude scene when he gives her a massage. Offered drugs, she quips, “The only trips I take are to Europe.” As an elderly actress stuck in rock-bottom junk, Hopkins unsurprisingly still delights in rubbing our noses in gross, flamboyant, inappropriate behaviour – and that after all is her ultimate function on screen, and the key to her achievement in all her best pre-Code films between 1930 and 1934.

Hopkins died in 1972, a few months after attending a disastrous screening of The Story of Temple Drake at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, where the audience laughed at the film. They were laughing, presumably, because the sexuality she was portraying in that movie was so brazen, so thorny, so uncomfortable and un-empowered and frightening. Hopkins was stung by their reaction, but she was a virtuoso of self-deception. Asked about it shortly afterwards by interviewer John Kobal, she defended the film vehemently, and bragged: “They show it often at the Museum of Modern Art.”

Writer Allan Ellenberger has been working on a biography of Hopkins for several years now, and he has the participation of her adopted son Michael, who was told by Hopkins as a small child that the worst thing a man can be is a bad lover. When he asked what she did with a man who was a bad lover, Hopkins replied, “I kick him out of bed!” Inappropriate mothering? Perhaps. But Michael is reportedly still fond of his shameless mother, and whatever her on and offscreen peccadilloes, it’s challenging but profitable to share his fondness. There are certain people who make life, and the movies, more colourful, and Miriam Hopkins is decidedly one of those people.

In 1940 she acted in Tennessee Williams’s first produced play Battle of Angels, and she is like many of the playwright’s female characters rolled into one: part Blanche DuBois, part Maggie the Cat, part Maxine Faulk – a Southern vixen who cannot shut up and cannot rest quietly. “Now here is a woman who could take my frequently over-written speeches and match them with an emotional opulence of her own,” Williams wrote to his producer. Hopkins has never generated a cult, partly because some of her best films are hard to see and partly because her acting style and her deepest performing impulses are too unflattering, exasperating, bizarre and threatening for easy consumption. She is an acquired taste, but so offbeat at her best that she deserves wary tribute as a model of the excitement of uncapped negative energy and the sometimes liberating creative destructiveness of self-indulgence.