Photo circa 1975 via YouTube
November 13, 1922 – Madeleine Sherwood:
“All my life, since I was a tiny girl, my idea has been to be in New York and on the stage.“
Madeleine Sherwood was an astonishingly good character actor who is closely associated with the works of Tennessee Williams, especially her portrayals of Mae/Sister Woman and Miss Lucy in both the Broadway and film versions of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof and Sweet Bird Of Youth, yet she will always remembered as the strict but benevolent Reverend Mother Superior on the absurdist feminist fantasy television series The Flying Nun, with Sally Field. The series ran for 82 episodes on ABC from 1967 to 1970. It was about a 90-pound nun who had the ability to catch a passing breeze and fly because of the high winds at her Puerto Rican convent on a cliff and the large, heavily starched cornet that was the headpiece for her habit. The show was a hit and a cultural phenomenon.
“The Flying Nun”, ABC via YouTube screen-grab
Sherwood was born as Madeleine Louise Hélène Thornton in Montreal. She never gave up her Canadian citizenship and returned to Canada in the early 1990s.
She started her professional career in Montreal, working in CBC soap operas. She attended the Yale School of Drama. Sherwood hitchhiked to New York City in 1950, and at first, she slept on a park bench and ate at an automat. But she did find work right away, and in 1953 she got her big break playing the role of Abigail in Arthur Miller‘s allegory for McCarthyism, The Crucible, then Elia Kazan cast her in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof (1954) and Sweet Bird Of Youth (1959). She was also in Williams’ The Night Of The Iguana (1962) on Broadway, and made film debut was in Williams’ Baby Doll (1956), directed by Kazan.
Her other Broadway credits include Camelot (1961), the delightful Richard Rodgers/Stephen Sondheim musical Do I Hear a Waltz? (1965), and Edward Albee‘s All Over (1971). Her final stage performance was in a Williams’ play, The Glass Menagerie.
She became a member of the Actors Studio in 1957 working with Lee Strasberg and was a life member of the Studio.
When I consider Sherwood, I think first of the film version of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof (1958), a powerful, highly-charged, story of a neurotic, dysfunctional Southern family with its rivalries, tensions, and greed. Its screenplay is by director Richard Brooks. MGM’s posters proclaimed:
“ALL THE SULTRY EXPLOSIVE DRAMA OF TENNESSEE WILLIAMS’ PULITZER PRIZE PLAY IS NOW ON THE SCREEN.”
The studio’s promise was not kept; the film totally de-gays the play, which makes little sense because it is a play about homosexuality. Yet, missing the key component, it still delivers a wallop. Sherwood plays Mae who has five children and is pregnant with a sixth. Maggie the Cat calls her a “monster of fertility”. Mae was once the “cotton carnival queen”, but her family is not as rich as her husband Gooper thinks they are. Mae is determined to ensure that she inherits Gooper’s family property, and she is in a fierce contest with Maggie over this issue. Mae is also unhappy at her failure to get accepted by the smartest young set in Memphis. Sherwood nails it.
With Judith Anderson and Taylor in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, MGM, Screen-grab via YouTube
The film was one of the Top Ten box-office hits of 1958. It received six Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Actor (Paul Newman, his first Oscar nomination), Best Actress (Elizabeth Taylor with her second of four consecutive nominations), Best Director for Brooks, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Cinematography for William H. Daniels. It failed to win any Oscars. Curiously, Burl Ives was nominated and won an Oscar in 1958 as Best Supporting Actor in The Big Country rather than for his performance in Cat On a Hot Tin Roof.
The original stage production of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof (1955) had Ben Gazzara playing the role of Brick, but he rejected the film role and so did Elvis Presley. Lana Turner and Grace Kelly both went after the role of Maggie, but Taylor was cast. There was never any doubt about casting Sherwood.
Sherwood was blacklisted during the McCarthy era. During the blacklist, when performers were denied work because of their leftist ties, Sherwood was never called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). But Kazan, a former Communist, was and he named names and ruined lives. So did Ives. Many people in the biz criticized Kazan’s 1999 Academy Award for lifetime achievement when he was 89 years old, because even as an exemplary talent, he turned out to be a rat.
During the Civil Rights Movement, Sherwood worked alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. In the late 1950s and 1960s she traveled in the American South as part the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE). She was arrested during a Freedom Walk, jailed, and sentenced to six months hard labor for “Endangering the Customs and Mores of the People of Alabama”. Take that Jefferey Beauregard Sessions III!
She started in soap operas and Sherwood loved working in them over the years, with long runs on The Guiding Light and The Secret Storm. She made special appearances on All My Children and Another World.
In the 1980s, she was one of the first women to receive grants to direct short films from the American Film Institute (AFI) along with Cicely Tyson and Joanne Woodward.
In the 1970s, she met Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem plus other activists at the first Women’s Sexual Conference at Barnard College in New York City. She soon started feminist consciousness-raising groups and counseling workshops.
In the early 1990s, she returned to Canada. She had been a long-term permanent resident of the United States, but always remained a Canadian citizen. Sherwood’s final credits rolled in 2016 at her childhood home in Quebec. She was 93 years old.
