October 2012

In the span of five days, two talented Mainers gave their final bows and went to that great sound stage in the sky. Aren’t they now playing wonderfully against each other, even if they never happened to share the limelight here on earth?

Phyllis Thaxter (November 1921-August 12, 2012) starred with Van Johnson and Spencer Tracy in the 1944 wartime classic Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo.

When we interviewed Thaxter a decade ago, she said she grew up on 314 Danforth Street in the West End. “We also lived at 17 Storer Street, which became part of Waynflete before it burned to the ground. 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.”

And what a career. Her triumphs include Springfield Rifle, with Gary Cooper; The Sea of Grass, with Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy; and Jim Thorpe, All American, opposite Burt Lancaster. Praised for her “bright, darting eyes and her lithe, expressive body,” Thaxter 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). Wasn’t it wonderful when she channeled the dark side of marriage in a 1962 episode of The Twilight Zone? She was in no fewer than nine episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, some of which feature her playing against the grain (she was relentlessly typecast as an ingenue or dewy-eyed newlywed on the silver screen). After all but retiring, she delighted moviegoers by turning up as Christopher Reeve’s mom in Superman.

“But my deepest connections are to Maine,” she told us. In fact, 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.”

Another of her crushes was revealed just weeks ago. At the dawn of her career, working on Broadway as an understudy for Lynn Fontanne, she fell in love with fellow castmember Montgomery Clift. As Thaxter’s daughter Skye Aubrey told The New York Times, “They were very much in love. They talked about getting married. They were planning on it. Then he found out he was gay.”

Here’s a trivia question: Did you know that before she became Mrs. Gilbert Lea, Phyllis Thaxter was married to James Thomas Aubrey Jr., the president of CBS and MGM?

Every arts organization in Maine owes a debt of gratitude to Fritzi Cohen (February 15, 1923-August 7, 2012). A powerful stage and screen presence, Cohen also swept audiences away as “New England’s first on-air drama critic,” according to WCSH-TV, the station that featured her segments from the 1960s and forward, and was an enthusiastic early supporter of PortOpera.

Daring to dream that a serious actress could live in Maine and advance her career, Fritzi Jane Courtney (as she’s listed on IMDB.com) charmed directors (notably Steven Spielberg in Jaws; see “Swimming with the Sharks,” Summerguide 2012) and knew how to hit her audiences where they lived. As she told us in her low, seductive voice during a visit to our office earlier this summer, looking striking in a snappy red and black ensemble at 89, “I’d just been working on Lenny at Charles Playhouse in Boston when I got the call to audition. I was exhausted. I asked what’s it about. ‘A big fish.’ Who’s directing it? ‘Some kid.’”

Trivia question: Did you know that Fritzi used to write a column for Portland Magazine?

To hear from Fritzi what is was like to work with Joan Crawford in Poland Spring in an episode of Route 66, visit portlandmonthly.com/portmag/2012/09/cohen. How we’ll miss you, Fritzi.