FROM THE EDITOR

Our “10 Most Intriguing People In Maine” story begins, appropriately enough, on page 10. But you’ll only find 9 people there. That’s because actress Phyllis Thaxter, 77 this month, appears right here. Phyllis spent her girlhood “on 314 Danforth Street in the West End” as the daughter of Justice Sidney St. Felix Thaxter and Phyllis Schuyler Thaxter, the 1920s Broadway star for whom South Portland’s Thaxter Theatre is named.

“We also lived at 17 Storer Street, which became part of Waynflete before it burned to the ground about 10 years ago,” she says. “I went to Butler, Waynflete, and Deering High. I’d have graduated with the Class of ’38 had I not gone to Montreal and on to an acting career.”

Her first crush was with a Maine island less than half a mile from shore: “Summers we lived on Cushing, in a John Calvin Stevens house with a lovely wraparound porch right up on the hill. You can still see it if you’re on a boat coming into port.”

Then she fell in love with Hollywood and charmed scribes like Cecil Smith: “Her sense of stage is spontaneous; her vivacity borders on brilliance, and her style is her very own.”

Wartime Portland had barely missed her before she was up in lights in Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, 1945; Springfield Rifle, with Gary Cooper; The Sea of Grass, with Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy; and Jim Thorpe, All American, with Burt Lancaster. Praised for her “bright, darting eyes and her lythe, expressive body,” Phyllis went on to star with John Garfield (The Breaking Point, 1950), James Cagney, Gene Kelly, Robert Ryan, Cornell Wilde, Ronald Reagan (She’s Working Her Way Through College, 1952), even Peter Sellers (The World of Henry Orient, 1964). But the bunch of them couldn’t persuade her from returning to her native Portland.

Since the mid-1960s she’s lived a double life, volunteering at Maine Medical while appearing on “Twilight Zone,” playing golf at Portland Country Club with husband Gilbert Lea (AllAmerican on Princeton’s undefeated 1935 football team and former president of Tower Publishing) after a surprise turn as Clark Kent’s mother in 1978’s Superman, and watching her grandchildren grow up (daughter Skye Aubrey starred in Broadway’s “Cactus Flower” before Goldie Hawn appeared in the movie) while sneaking in a stunner with Vanessa Redgrave in 1985’s Three Sovereigns for Sarah.

“But my deepest connections are to Maine. My brother, the late Sidney Thaxter, was a partner at Curtis, Thaxter, et. al.; my sister Hildegarde (Mrs. William Niss) was married to the late Judge Edward Gignoux; and my nephew, Sidney St. Felix “Pete” Thaxter, works at Curtis Thaxter to this day,” says Mrs. Lea of Falmouth Foreside, who doesn’t think it’s at all amazing that she’d mysteriously choose a life in Maine over a life of fame. “Mysterious?” she laughs. “Then we’re all mysterious, aren’t we!”

Published in November 1998.