She worked as the duo’s beautifully attired foil for five years, touring the country and taking her stage name, Mayo, from one of the comics. When a vaudeville act called “Pansy the Horse” came to town, the two comics who wore the horse costume asked Mayo to join them as the girl in the act. “I fell in love with the whole idea of being up there on stage, of wearing all those wonderful, beautiful costumes,” she told The Times in 1981.Īfter graduating from high school in 1937, Mayo broke into show business as a dancer with the St. She showed an early interest in show business and took drama, dance and elocution lessons at her aunt’s acting school. 30, 1920, Mayo was the daughter of a newspaper reporter and his wife. “She played with all the big names of her era, in both comedies and dramas.”īasinger, author of the 1993 book “A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women,” said Mayo appeared in “films that guarantee her place in film history,” including “White Heat” and “The Best Years of Our Lives.” But she also “was a great foil for comedians, and that’s a difficult role to play, and she did it well,” Basinger said.īorn Virginia Clara Jones in St. “Virginia Mayo was one of the truly great beauties of her era, and I think that people forget what a big star she really was,” said Jeanine Basinger, head of the film studies program at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn. “His acting was so real that I was really scared half the time we were on the set.”ĭuring the 1940s and ‘50s, Mayo appeared in more than 40 films, including “The Girl From Jones Beach” with Ronald Reagan, “Captain Horatio Hornblower” with Gregory Peck, “The Silver Chalice” with Paul Newman, “The Flame and the Arrow” with Burt Lancaster, “Along the Great Divide” with Kirk Douglas and “Colorado Territory” with Joel McCrea. “Jimmy was the master actor, the most dynamic star the screen ever had,” Mayo told the Los Angeles Times in 1981. Three years later, after moving to Warner Bros., Mayo gave one of her best-remembered performances, in “White Heat,” director Raoul Walsh’s crime melodrama in which Mayo played the unscrupulous wife of Cagney, a mentally disturbed gang boss who alternately cuddles and slaps her. Goldwyn cast Mayo against her image as the dream girl next door in “The Best Years of Our Lives.” Mayo was widely praised for her first major dramatic role as the two-timing wife of Andrews, a returning war veteran, in the Oscar-winning 1946 film.
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