Ann Rutherford
Ann Rutherford is an actor, born 1917.
MGM had a specific use for Ann Rutherford and it used her hard. Born in Vancouver in 1917, she spent her best years as the studio's idea of the girl next door, playing Polly Benedict in twelve of the sixteen Andy Hardy films between 1937 and 1942. That meant a steady salary, a national profile and a very narrow acting range to work inside. Around that run she was slotted into prestige productions where the same quality was useful.
Which is how she became Carreen O'Hara, the youngest and gentlest of the sisters in Gone with the Wind, and Lydia Bennet in the 1940 Pride and Prejudice, where she got a girl whose enthusiasm is a genuine social problem. The best of these parts is the Spirit of Christmas Past in the 1938 A Christmas Carol, which asks for something stranger than charm and receives it.
The postwar work thinned out, as it did for most contract players once the studio system loosened. She was Gertrude Griswold in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty in 1947 and Donna Elena in Adventures of Don Juan in 1948, then moved to television anthologies including Climax! and Panic!, with a much later appearance on The Bob Newhart Show. She died in 2012, still identified with a handful of films made in the five years before 1943.
Movies (6)
TV (4)
Where to start with Ann Rutherford
Everyone arrives via Gone with the Wind, though Carreen is a small part in a very long film, so treat it as context rather than a showcase.
The one to actually watch is A Christmas Carol. MGM's version is brisk and unfussy, and Rutherford's Spirit of Christmas Past is the sequence people remember, played with a lightness that makes the haunting feel kind rather than punitive. After that, Pride and Prejudice gives her Lydia Bennet, which is plainly the most fun she gets to have on screen: the character is a menace and Rutherford commits to it completely.
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is the postwar curiosity, a Danny Kaye vehicle that keeps interrupting itself, and Adventures of Don Juan is late-period swashbuckling with Errol Flynn. For television, Climax! is the anthology worth sampling.