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greatest demands on her as an actress; the thirty-five-year time span required
alterations of voice, posture, gait, and expression. At the end she moved the
way a sixty-five-year-old woman with a heart condition would. The public
might not have warmed to Sister Kenny, but the Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Sciences at least acknowledged Rosalind s dramatically rich per-
formance with a best actress nomination, her second. Because Sister Kenny
was such a tour de force for an actress known primarily for romantic comedy,
there was always the possibility that the Academy would be impressed with
her transformation. However, the transformation that impressed them was
Olivia de Havilland s in To Each His Own (1946), in which the actress aged
twenty years not much of a stretch compared to Rosalind s thirty-five.
Rosalind may have missed out on an Oscar, but she won a Golden Globe, a
Blue Ribbon award from Box Office magazine, a New York Foreign Language
Press award, the New York University Motion Picture Club s Citation of
Merit, and the Parents magazine medal, which were at least a mark of recog-
nition. But, as Rosalind reasoned, there was always next year, which also
brought another nomination but no statuette.
Sister Kenny provided Rosalind with a welcome vacation from comedy,
which she had every intention of prolonging, until audiences were convinced
106 LOSING TO LORETTA
that she could do more serious and, from her standpoint, more challenging
roles. Rosalind s next film demanded even more from her public than did
Sister Kenny: a three-hour version of Eugene O Neill s Pulitzer prize winning
Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), with Rosalind as the sexually repressed,
father-fixated, mother-loathing Lavinia Mannon.
Bringing Mourning to the screen virtually intact was the dream of
Dudley Nichols, who had written the Sister Kenny screenplay, assisted by
Rosalind s co-star, Alexander Knox, and Mary McCarthy, who, like Rosalind,
also knew Elizabeth Kenny. Electra was another matter. In addition to being
a theatrical monolith, Electra was a trilogy, modeled after the only extant one
in Greek tragedy, Aeschylus s Oresteia.
The Oresteia traced the curse on the house of Atreus through a concate-
nation of actions involving adultery, infanticide, homicide, human sacrifice,
matricide, and madness enough material for a mini series, much less a tril-
ogy. Aeschylus wrote for an audience familiar with its myths, thus enabling
him to allude to events that occurred prior to the main action without having
to explain them. The Greeks would have known, for example, that the house
of Atreus was under an ancestral curse, resulting from Thyestes s seduction of
the wife of his brother Atreus, who retaliated by murdering two of Thyestes s
three sons and using their bodily parts for a stew that he served their unwit-
ting father. Once Thyestes discovers what he has eaten, he curses Atreus and
his descendants, Agamemnon and Menelaus. First, Agamemnon must come
to the aid of his brother, Menelaus, whose wife, Helen, has been abducted (or
seduced) by the Trojan prince Paris, thus precipitating the Trojan War. Next,
Agamemnon, on his return from the war, is hacked to death in his bath by his
wife, Clytemnestra, who has never forgiven him for sacrificing their daugh-
ter, Iphigenia, to obtain a fair wind to sail to Troy. Clytemnestra has also taken
a lover, Aegisthus, whom she prefers to her husband. As fate would have
it, Aegisthus is Thyestes s sole surviving son, making him an instrument in
the execution of his father s curse. In keeping with the principle of retributive
justice, Orestes and Electra, the children of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra,
avenge their father s murder. Orestes, goaded on by Electra, has no other
LOSING TO LORETTA 107
choice but to kill Clytemnestra, whose death still does not lift the curse. Since
Orestes has committed matricide, he is hounded by the Furies, who are
finally placated not dramatically, but philosophically as retribution yields
to justice tempered by mercy.
O Neill Americanized Aeschylus, substituting the Civil War for the
Trojan War, switching the setting to New England, jettisoning the philo-
sophical denouement, replacing matricide with suicide, and giving the char-
acters names that are faintly evocative of their classical counterparts. Atreus
and Thyestes become Abe and David Mannon; Agamemnon, Ezra Mannon;
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