Marjorie Main

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Marjorie Main (24 February 1890 - 10 April 1975) was an Oscar-nominated American character actress, perhaps best known for her role as Ma Kettle in a series of ten Ma and Pa Kettle movies.

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Early life

Marjorie Main was born in Acton, Indiana as Mary Tomlinson. She attended Franklin College, in Franklin, Indiana and adopted a stage name to avoid embarrassing her father, who was a minister. She worked in vaudeville on the Chautauqua and Orpheum circuits, and debuted on Broadway in 1916. Her first film was A House Divided in 1931.

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Career

Marjorie Main began playing upper class dowagers, but was ultimately typecast in abrasive, domineering, salty roles: her distinct voice was like chalk upon a blackboard. She repeated her stage role in Dead End in the movie version of 1937, and was subsequently cast repeatedly as the mother of gangsters. She again transferred a strong stage performance, as a dude ranch operator in The Women, to film in 1939. She made six comedies with Wallace Beery in the 1940s.

She played Ma Kettle in The Egg and I in 1947 opposite Percy Kilbride as Pa Kettle. She was nominated for an Academy Award for the role, and repeated it in nine more films.

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Private life

Main married Stanley LeFevre Krebs, who died in 1935. Her near-pathological fear of germs did not interfere with her career.

She was later an open lesbian, and was one of Boze Hadleigh's most open interviewees in his book Hollywood Lesbians (1996). Her own lover was Spring Byington with whom she lived openly in Beverly Hills, and which might have surprised many people given Byington's near constant casting in sweetly maternal roles. Main was quoted by Hadleigh as saying: "...it's true that Spring never had any use for men."

Main died in Los Angeles, California, of lung cancer at the age of 85.

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Theatre

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Films

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External links

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