Bonita Granville

Bonita Granville
Golden Pictures

Stars

Bonita Granville
Film: North side of the 6600 block of Hollywood Boulevard
Actress
Born Feb. 2, 1923 in Chicago, Ill.
Died Oct. 11, 1988 of cancer in St. John's Hospital, CA

Bonita Granville went on stage at age 3 and into films when she was 7.

She was the daughter of Bernard Granville, a Ziegfeld Follies dancer and granddaughter of Maria Brambilla, a ballerina with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo.

The family had her on stage as a baby and, after a move to California, in films as a child. Her first picture was "Westward Passage," in which she portrayed Laurence Olivier's daughter. But soon her flair for more serious roles led her to parts as "the wicked kid."

As early as 1938, when she was only 15, she was regretting roles like the bewitched village girl in "Maid of Salem."

"They aren't me," said the teenager whose friends called her "Bunny." But the lament to an interviewer did not keep her from the darkest of all her parts, the role of Mary Tilford in "These Three," a version of Lillian Hellman's "The Children's Hour" in which a lying schoolgirl accuses her two schoolmistresses of lesbianism. The portrayal earned her an Academy Award nomination for supporting actress.

Not all her roles were so gloomy, however. She was Nancy Drew, the girl detective in a series of appealing films of the late 1930s, and by the dawn of the 1940s she was being cast as a leading lady.

Her wartime pictures included "Gallant Sons," "The People vs. Dr. Kildare," "H. M. Pulham, Esq.," "Now Voyager," "Hitler's Children" and "Song of the Open Road."

"Hitler's Children," a popular film of the day, was the first to mark her emergence from ingenue parts.

In all, she had made more than 50 pictures before Jack Wrather, who had financed one of the last of them, wooed, wed and then retired from acting the petite blond with the pouting smile.

She stopped making films, except for an occasional one for Wrather Corp. because, as she said in a 1985 interview a year after her husband's death, "I decided that Jack was not the type of person . . . who would have a wife on location. He was a very strong man. And a jealous man. . . . He wanted my time and my attention and I gave it to him willingly. And joyfully."

She did venture into television in its early years and was seen in such dramatic classics of the medium as "Studio One" and "Playhouse 90."

She helped Wrather produce the enormously popular and profitable "Lassie" TV series before moving behind the entertainment scene, as husband and wife concentrated on hotel and real estate ventures.

She also developed her own causes and spoke out often on the need to protect the environment and instill familial wholesomeness in children, themes reflected in the weekly series about a boy and his collie.

Wrather had built the Disneyland Hotel adjacent to the Anaheim tourist attraction in 1955 because his close friend, Walt Disney, could not afford to finance both a hotel and an amusement park. Wrather also acquired acreage north and south of the hotel.

Later the Wrathers turned the city of Long Beach's Queen Mary venture into a commercially viable attraction and then made a success of Howard Hughes' giant wooden airplane, the Spruce Goose, next door.

His wife took work from their offices in Beverly Hills to their Early American-style Bel-Air home. Papers from baskets marked "Personal" or "Do It Today" or "Long Ranger" vied for attention with phone calls from her son, Christopher, who shared corporation responsibilities with her, or her daughters, Linda and Molly. There were also nine grandchildren.

She said questions about her earlier years in show business embarrassed her as her life moved into the more conservative world of acquisitions and leaseholds. Her friends included the Holmes Tuttles, the Justin Darts, the Henry Salvatoris and Ronald and Nancy Reagan. This was the nucleus of what would be the "kitchen cabinet," that intimate circle that had urged Reagan to run first for governor of California and then president.

Mrs. Wrather's civic interests also mounted as the Wrather successes grew. She was on the board and was a former president of the Los Angeles Orphanage Guild; a founder-member of the Los Angeles Music Center and a member of one of its primary support groups, the Amazing Blue Ribbon.

In 1972, President Nixon named her to the board of trustees of the John F. Kennedy Center. Reagan appointed her to another term in 1982.

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Points of interest

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    Academy Awards

    Year Category Work
    1936 Best Supporting Actress These Three Nomination

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