12 Hollywood Actors You Didn’t Know Had Jewish Wives – HT

 

You remember the golden age of Hollywood, don’t you? The studio approved glamour and those flawless fairy tale romances. But real life happens the moment the cameras stop rolling. Today, we’re skipping the PR spin to look at 13 incredible women who refused to be managed by the studios, the scandals, or the legends they loved.

Before we pull back that velvet curtain, go ahead and hit the subscribe button. It’s entirely free and unlike a 1950s studio contract, you can back out anytime without getting sued. Kirk Douglas and Anne Bidens. Kirk Douglas was born Issur Danielovitch in Amsterdam, New York. The son of Belorussian Jewish immigrants who spoke little English and worked themselves to exhaustion so their son could have the life they could not imagine for themselves. He changed his name.

 He changed his accent. He spent 30 years becoming the most American version of himself that the industry would accept. In 1953, he met Anne Bidens in Paris. She was working as a publicist, Belgian born, multilingual Jewish, raised in a Europe that had made being Jewish a matter of survival rather than simply identity.

 She understood what it meant to exist in a world that required you to be something other than what you were. She moved through rooms with a competence that did not announce itself but simply operated. Douglas proposed twice. She refused him the first time. They were married in 1954 and remained so for 65 years until his death in 2020 at 103. She was 102 at the time.

 They had outlasted almost everyone who had ever known them. Douglas said in his later years that Anne was the only honest voice in his life. Not the only voice, the only honest one. In an industry where the currency of every conversation was flattery and strategic positioning, she told him what she actually thought about his performances, about his choices, about the moments when the ambition he had built his life around was leading him somewhere he should not go.

 In 1960, Douglas produced and starred in Spartacus, which broke the Hollywood blacklist by publicly crediting Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood Ten who had been writing under a pseudonym for years. It was the most politically dangerous decision of his career. The decision to do it came from a conversation with Anne.

 She did not take credit for it. She did not need to. Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Paul Newman’s father was Jewish. He grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio, and spent most of his adult life deflecting questions about his religious identity with the ease of a man who had decided the question was not interesting enough to answer directly.

 He met Joanne Woodward while they were both on Broadway in 1953. He was married to someone else. She was the woman he was supposed to not fall in love with. Woodward was born in Thomasville, Georgia, and brought to their partnership a sharp Southern pragmatism that had no patience for performance off camera. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1958, the same year they married, which meant that Hollywood’s golden couple began their marriage with her holding the Oscar and him still waiting for his.

 He would wait another 28 years. Newman won once after being nominated nine times and conducted himself under that specific frustration with a public grace that seemed almost physically difficult to sustain. Woodward described him, late in his life, as the most disciplined person she had ever known. The discipline she was describing was not the discipline of performance.

 It was the discipline of being a good man in a situation that makes goodness structurally inconvenient. Enormous wealth, enormous fame, and an industry that rewards neither restraint nor consistency. He was consistently good for 50 years until his death in 2008. She was there for all of it, not as a supporting figure in his story, as the one person in his life whose opinion of him could not be purchased or managed or spun.

 In Hollywood, that is rarer than the Oscar. Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. In the spring of 1944, on the set of To Have and Have Not, a 19-year-old model from the Bronx whose real name was Betty Joan Perske arrived on set. Her screen name would become one of the most recognizable in cinema history. Lauren Bacall was born Jewish. Her mother was Natalie Weinstein Bacall.

In an era when the studios managed their stars’ backgrounds with the same precision they applied to publicity photographs, this was a detail that required careful navigation. Bogart was 44. By the time Bacall arrived, he was a man who had shed most of his capacity for pretense. They fell in love during production.

 His third marriage was still technically in place, and the period between the beginning of their relationship and the finalization of his divorce was volatile in a way that their later image, the gold standard of Hollywood romance, tends to obscure. They married in May 1945. He was 45, she was 20. What happened after was not a fairy tale.

 It was better. It was two people building an actual life, complete with children and arguments, and the specific pleasure of being known by someone who does not require you to perform. Bogart had been performing one version or another of himself for 20 years by the time Bacall arrived. With her, he largely stopped.

He died in 1957 at 57. She sat beside him until the end. She outlived him by 57 years, dying in 2014 at 89. She was nominated for the Academy Award for the first time at 70 years old. The industry had taken five decades to formally notice. She received the nomination with the particular graciousness of a woman who no longer required anyone else’s attention to understand her own value.

The girl from the Bronx, born Betty Perske, gave Humphrey Bogart the best years of his life. He knew it. He said so. It required very few words. Cary Grant and Dyan Cannon. By the time Cary Grant met Dyan Cannon, he had already been married three times. He had been Archibald Leach from Bristol, England before the studios repackaged him as the most debonair man in American cinema.

The man who made elegance look like a birthright rather than a construction. Cannon was 25 years his junior. Born Samille Diane Friesen in Tacoma, Washington to a Jewish mother and a Baptist father, she had been raised navigating both traditions and brought to the relationship an energy that was the precise opposite of Grant’s carefully controlled cool.

 They married in 1965. Grant was 61. Their daughter Jennifer was born the following year. It was Grant’s first child. He was 62 years old when he became a father for the first time. What followed surprised everyone who thought they knew who Cary Grant was. The man who had spent four decades projecting amused detachment, who had turned keeping the world at arms length into an art form, discovered in this one small person a reason to stop performing.

 He became, by his daughter’s account and by Cannon’s, a father of total and unglamorous devotion. Bottle feedings, bedtime stories, the unglamorous architecture of parenting that had nothing to do with the image on the screen. The marriage did not survive. By 1968, it was over and the divorce was contentious in the way divorces between people who still feel something always are.

 But Grant remained in Jennifer’s life with a consistency that had been absent from every other long-term relationship he had attempted. He never understood how to be a husband. He understood finally how to be a father. Diane Cannon gave him that. It was the most important thing she gave him and she gave it at 62. When most men of his generation had already decided who they were going to be. Frank Sinatra and Mia Farrow.

 Frank Sinatra met Mia Farrow on a film set in 1964. He was 49, she was 21. The gap between them was not merely years. Farrow was the daughter of the director John Farrow and the actress Maureen O’Sullivan. Raised Catholic in a Hollywood household that had its own considerable complications. She was not the woman that Sinatra’s world had been designed to accommodate.

She was too young, too independent and as it turned out, too serious about her work to function as a decorative companion to the most powerful man in American entertainment. They married in 1966. His inner circle were not enthusiastic. Dean Martin referred to the marriage with the casual cruelty that men of that generation used to cover discomfort.

 The press found the age difference endlessly productive. The marriage lasted two years. It ended when Sinatra served Farrow with divorce papers on the set of Rosemary’s Baby. She had refused to leave the production which was running over schedule and conflicting with his film. He expected her to choose him.

 She chose Roman Polanski’s film instead. Consider what that actually required. She was 23 years old. He was Frank Sinatra, the most connected, most feared, most socially consequential man in the entertainment industry. And she looked at the situation, calculated what she was willing to trade away, and decided the answer was not her work.

 The film she stayed to finish is now one of the most celebrated horror films ever made. Her performance is the reason. Sinatra moved on. Farrow went on to adopt 12 children across three decades, to partner with UNICEF, and to become one of the most tireless humanitarian voices in the American cultural landscape.

 She got the better of the bargain. She understood that before he did. Spencer Tracy and Louise Tracy. Spencer Tracy married Louise Treadwell in 1923 and did not divorce her when their son John was born deaf and the pressure of that discovery began reshaping everything. He did not divorce her when his alcoholism became something that could no longer be managed quietly.

 He did not divorce her in 1941 when he met Katharine Hepburn and began the relationship that would define his public romantic identity for the rest of his life. He never divorced Louise Tracy. Louise came from a prominent family with deep Episcopalian roots. The kind of background that the studios found reassuring and unremarkable.

 What they could not have predicted was what she would do with the life she had been handed. When John was diagnosed, the resources available to families of deaf children in the early 20th century were wholly inadequate to what those families actually needed. Louise Tracy did not accept the inadequacy. In 1942, she founded the John Tracy Clinic, an institution dedicated to the education of deaf children, and crucially, to training their parents.

 Because she understood that what a child needed most was not a specialist, but a parent who knew how to reach them. Tracy lived with Hepburn in the open secret way that Hollywood accommodated certain arrangements when the parties involved were significant enough. Louise knew. The industry knew. The understanding held because Louise Tracy was not a woman whose dignity could be removed by what other people chose to do.

Tracy died in 1967. Louise continued running the clinic for years afterward. It still operates. Thousands of deaf children and their families have been served by something that began in one woman’s refusal to be defeated by circumstances she did not choose. Spencer Tracy gets the plaque. Louise Tracy built the institution.

 These are not the same thing. Gregory Peck and Veronique Passani. Gregory Peck’s side first marriage ended in 1955 after 12 years. He was one of the most admired men in American public life. The actor who had become synonymous with a quality of moral seriousness the country had decided it needed from its movie stars in post-war decades.

 Atticus Finch was still seven years in the future. The reputation that role would crystallize was already being built. In 1955 he married Veronique Passani, a French journalist he had met when she interviewed him in Paris. She was Jewish, born and raised in France, and had lived through the German with the specific and unsentimentalized understanding of what that experience does to a person’s relationship with history, with truth, with the difference between what people say and what they mean.

 She brought to their marriage a journalist’s instinct for the latter. She could identify performed sincerity. She was not easily managed. They were married for 48 years until Peck’s death in 2003. In 1975, a sudden and private tragedy shattered Peck’s world when his eldest son from his first marriage was lost to a quiet internal darkness that no one who loved him had been able to reach in time.

 The grief of that year was something that Veronique held with him in the way that only people who have been together long enough to understand the full weight of what the other person is carrying can hold something. She did not minimize it. She did not manage it. She was present for it in the way that presence, actual sustained unperforming presence, is the only adequate response to certain kinds of loss.

 He is buried in Los Angeles. She arranged it as she had arranged, quietly and without ceremony, most of the things in their life that mattered. James Mason and Pamela Mason. James Mason was one of the great British actors of the mid-20th century. A man whose voice alone, dark, precise, threaded with irony, was sufficient to carry scenes that other actors would have needed their entire faces to perform.

 He moved to Hollywood in the late 1940s and became one of the industry’s most reliable and least celebrated leading men. Reliable in the sense of consistently excellent and uncelebrated in the way that consistent excellence without scandal tends to be. Pamela Kelling Mason, whom he married in 1941, was born into a Jewish family in London and brought to their partnership a quality of assessment so forthright that Mason’s biographers have described it, depending on their sympathies, as either admirable directness or sustained intensity. She was a writer, a wit, and

eventually a television personality in Los Angeles, where her show ran for years on the strength of her willingness to say exactly what she thought about whatever subject presented itself. They divorced in 1964 after 23 years. What made the Mason marriage significant was not its length or its end, but what it represented in the context of post-war Hollywood.

 A British actor of considerable prestige and a Jewish woman of considerable personality meeting each other approximately as equals in an industry organized entirely around the opposite principle. Pamela Mason did not diminish herself for the marriage. She expanded into it as fully as it could hold her.

 When it could no longer, she left and went on being exactly who she was, writing, talking, insisting on being heard. The industry preferred its women quieter. She declined. William Holden and Brenda Marshall. William Holden became one of the most commercially successful actors of the 1950s, demonstrating a range he was not always credited for, partly because he wore his craft lightly and the industry tends to reward visible effort over invisible competence.

 He married Brenda Marshall in 1941. She had been working as a film actress when they met. A career that was overshadowed almost immediately by the acceleration of Holden’s own. She stepped back from acting. In the industry’s logic of that era, this was not a sacrifice. It was simply the arrangement. Holden’s alcoholism deepened through the 1950s and into the 1960s.

 His affairs were numerous. Marshall stayed through years that would have ended most marriages and then, on a timeline and for reasons that she never publicly detailed, she did not. They divorced in 1971 after 30 years. Holden died in 1981 alone in his Santa Monica apartment having fallen after a night of drinking. The apartment was empty.

 There was no one there to note the time, to hold his hand, to bear witness to the end of a life that had been watched by millions. He had spent three decades in the glare of considerable public attention and died in total private darkness. Brenda Marshall outlived him by 20 years. She died in 2004.

 In the decades between his death and hers, she was not frequently called upon to account for what the 30 years had cost and she did not volunteer to do so. There is a kind of dignity in that refusal. Not the dignity of bitterness, which requires a public to perform for. The simpler dignity of a woman who knew exactly what the years had cost and decided that the accounting was her own business and no one else’s.

Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth. Orson Welles made Citizen Kane at 25 and spent the next 40 years being unable to surpass it, which is the specific punishment the universe reserves for people who accomplish the greatest thing in their field before they are old enough to fully understand what has happened.

 He married Rita Hayworth in 1943. Hayworth was born Margarita Carmen Cansino in Brooklyn, the daughter of a Spanish dancer and a woman born Volga Hayworth, who was of Irish and Jewish descent. The Jewish heritage came through her mother’s side, the side that carries the identity within the matrilineal tradition, which made Hayworth Jewish in precisely the sense the tradition recognizes, regardless of what Columbia Pictures had constructed around her image.

 What Columbia had constructed was the Love Goddess. It was a title that did as much to diminish what she actually was as any label ever applied to any woman by any studio that owned her. What she actually was, a technically accomplished dancer who had been working professionally since childhood, a woman of considerable intelligence and a person who had survived a father whose management of her early career had done damages that took decades to understand.

 Welles loved her with genuine devotion and tremendous insufficiency. He was always working, always somewhere else, geographically or creatively or both. The marriage lasted until 1948. In 1947, he cast her in The Lady from Shanghai, which required her to cut and dye her famous red hair blonde. Columbia studio head Harry Cohn considered it willful corporate sabotage.

 The film is now regarded as one of the masterpieces of American noir. It contains a scene in a hall of mirrors where multiple images of them face each other and then shatter. Welles composed it as the marriage was ending. Whether he intended the symbolism is a question that no longer needs answering. The result speaks for itself.

 Hayworth died in 1987 after years of living with Alzheimer’s disease that had gone undiagnosed for much of its progression. By the end, she did not know who she was. The woman who had given her image to a generation paid for that gift in ways the generation never fully reckoned with. Welles died in 1985, two years before her, still working, still reaching for something the financing never arrived to complete.

The hall of mirrors, the shattered reflections, that is where their story lives, and it is as honest as anything either of them ever put on screen. Jack Nicholson and Anjelica Huston. Jack Nicholson never married Anjelica Huston. This requires acknowledgement before anything else because the 17 years they spent together, from 1973 to 1990, constituted something that the word relationship inadequately describes and that the word marriage only partially captures.

 Huston was born in California and raised between Ireland and England, the daughter of the director John Huston. Her grandmother on her maternal side was Jewish, which places her within the matrilineal tradition in a way she has addressed at different points in her life with varying degrees of specificity. What she brought to the relationship was a quality of unsentimental clarity.

 She was not naive about who Nicholson was. She understood the architecture of what she was entering, stayed for 17 years because something in what they were together was worth what it cost, and left when the arithmetic changed. In 1990, she discovered that another woman was pregnant with Nicholson’s child. She ended the relationship immediately with the same absence of ceremony she brought to most things. She had fully decided.

No extended negotiations. No prolonged ambiguity. She had calculated the situation and acted on the calculation. The years they had together produced what is now considered the sustained creative peak of Nicholson’s career. Chinatown, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Shining, Terms of Endearment. These were the Huston years.

 This is not coincidence. She won the Academy Award for Prizzi’s Honor in 1985, directed by her own father, in a performance that demonstrated a quality of intelligence that the 17 years with Nicholson had not diminished by a fraction. She spent the decades after doing exactly as she pleased with the specific freedom that belongs to women who have learned precisely where the lines are and what it costs to cross them on your own terms versus someone else’s.

 Ernest Borgnine and Ethel Merman, the marriage lasted 32 days. Ernest Borgnine and Ethel Merman married on June 27th, 1964 and announced their separation on July 29th, 1964. It remains one of the shortest celebrity marriages in the recorded history of American entertainment, and both parties spent the remainder of their lives approaching questions about it with a studied reluctance that communicated everything the silence was intended to communicate.

 Merman was born Ethel Agnes Zimmerman in Astoria, Queens in 1908 into a German-American family that was deeply rooted in Protestant tradition. What she inherited from that background was not relevant to her public life. What she built entirely on her own was. She became the most powerful voice in Broadway history. A woman whose projection needed no microphone, whose command of a room was described by those who witnessed it as something closer to a weather event than a performance.

There has never been another voice like it. There never will be. Borgnine had won the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1955 for Marty, playing a Bronx butcher with such lived-in specificity that audiences recognized someone real. He was warm, unpretentious, and possessed of a genuine quality that the camera loved in the uncomplicated way it sometimes loves people who are not performing being themselves.

 What happened during those 32 days has never been fully explained by either of them. The theories are numerous. The confirmed facts are few. What survived was the mutual agreement that the less said, the better. Merman, in her autobiography, devoted one blank page to the marriage where the Borgnine chapter should have been.

 Not a dismissal, not an insult, a blank page, white, clean, and total. It communicated with a precision that words would only have cluttered exactly what she thought of the subject. For a woman whose entire career was built on projection, on filling every available space with sound. The choice of silence was the loudest thing she ever said.

 They moved on. Separately, as quickly as they had moved together. Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft in 1961, a comedian from Brooklyn who had spent years writing sketches for Sid Caesar, met an actress from the Bronx who had recently been cast in a play that would change the trajectory of her career. Mel Brooks was born Melvin Kaminsky, the son of Jewish immigrants, and had built his early career on a kind of anarchic, self-aware humor that wore its origins loudly and without apology.

 He was funny in the way that comes from specific suffering, quick, defensive, disarming, and underneath all of it, genuinely warm. Anne Bancroft was born Anna Maria Louisa Italiano in the Bronx, the daughter of Italian immigrants, and was in 1961 preparing for her Broadway performance in The Miracle Worker, a role that would win her the Tony Award that year and the Academy Award the following year.

 She was, by any reasonable measure, the more celebrated person in the room when they met. She was not Jewish. She was Catholic, raised in the specific and serious way that Italian-American Catholic families in the Bronx raised their daughters. When she and Brooks married in 1964, the pairing struck some observers as unlikely.

 It struck the people who knew them as entirely inevitable. What they built over 41 years was a marriage that both of them described, in the rare moments when they spoke publicly about it, as the organizing fact of their lives. Brooks, whose comedy was built on the proposition that you could laugh at anything if you were brave enough to look at it directly, found in Bancroft someone with the same instinct operating through different channels.

 She was not a comedian. She was something rarer in Hollywood, an actress who did not require the audience to love her, only to believe her. She died in 2005 of uterine cancer at 73. Brooks has spoken of her death with the specific helplessness of a man whose entire architecture of humor was built to deflect pain and who found, when the pain arrived in its full weight, that none of the deflections were adequate.

He did not remarry. He has not remarry. Some people are not replaceable. He understood this immediately and has never pretended otherwise. 41 years. An Italian Catholic woman from the Bronx and a Jewish comedian from Brooklyn who made each other laugh for four decades and built a life so complete that its end left him, by his own account, still standing in it.

 That is the one that does not end cleanly. That is the one that does not end at all.