An actress with character…


 Isabel Jewell
            1907 – 1972 

 

She had a delightful singing voice but was rarely asked to sing. She was probably the most accomplished horsewoman in films of that day but she was rarely asked to do a Western. She was only 4’11” tall so leading parts were usually just out of her reach. But little Isabel brought audiences to tears as the naïve little seamstress who accompanied Ronald Colman to the guillotine in “A Tale of Two Cities” and as the prostitute with consumption who got a new lease on life when she elected to stay in the Shangri-la of “Lost Horizon”.



Isabel was born on July 19, 1907 on a ranch in Shoshone, Wyoming, the daughter of a doctor and a medical researcher. Riding horses became second nature to her while growing up but she traded her saddle in for stage roles at Hamilton College in Kentucky when she went into college dramatics with a fervor. After college it was on to a Lincoln, Nebraska stock company. She stayed in stock for several years until, suddenly she was asked to step into a role in a Broadway show “Up Pops The Devil” in 1930. With only 3 hours of rehearsal Isabel made her Broadway debut and won critical acclaim for her performance.

 

 


"Here Comes the Groom" (1934)with Jack Haley, Sidney Toler, Patricia Ellis and Isabel.

Her next Broadway role was another musical comedy “Blessed Event” and proved to be her ticket to Hollywood. When Warner Bros. wanted to make it into a film they took Isabel and Allan Jenkins (Dorothy Lane and Frankie Wells) along for the ride. But after that, typecast as a gum-chewing brassy blonde or gangster moll, Isabel would make 17 more films before she would ever sing again, among them “Manhattan Melodrama” with Clark Gable (the film that made stars of William Powell and Myrna Loy). Then, in late 1934, she was cast as Inez “Johnny” Johnson, a club singer in “Shadow of a Doubt” where she sang the title song.

 

 

 

 Another role that caught fire with Audiences was the part of “The Seamstress” in “A Tale of Two Cities”, the first of two films she would make with British actor Ronald Colman. “The final scenes including those with the pathetic little seamstress (Isabel Jewell) who has nothing to do with the plot but yet adds so much, are utterly true to Dickens, even to the ending with Carton’s famous words “It is a far, far better thing…”… as the camera moves upward from the guillotine to the sky, sparing us the bloody details…”(“From Scarface to Scarlett” by Roger Dooley).




Isabel did a second film with Colman in 1937 called “Lost Horizon” giving her another role she could sink her teeth into playing Gloria Stone, the consumptive streetwalker who opted to stay in the paradise of Shangri-la rather than go back to the degrading life she had on the outside. In 1939 she won the role of ‘poor white trash’ Emmy Slattery married to Tara’s cruel overseer in the classic “Gone With The Wind”. But then the famine began and while she worked steadily the roles were small and so were the pictures. In 1944’s “The Merry Monahans” Isabel got to sing and in 1946 as Belle Starr in “Badman’s Territory” she was able to show off her riding skills.  By 1952 she had added television guest shots to her resume but the big parts and big pictures were a thing of the past.


...with Kim Hunter in "Seventh Victim"

While Isabel was known to go out to nightclubs occasionally with William Hopper, Hedda’s son, in the 1930s little is known about her brief marriages to actor Paul Marion and writer Owen Crump. By the 1950s she was virtually out of a job and alone. It is on record that she was arrested in 1959 on bad check charges in Las Vegas and, in 1961 she was sentenced to 5 days in jail and a year’s probation for drunk driving. But by the mid-1960s Isabel was back at work and in the early 1970s she was on the set of two films. In “Ciao Manhattan” she played “Mummy” opposite Edie Sedgwick but by the time the film was released both actresses were dead.  Isabel was 64 and her cause of death was undisclosed. Edie was only 28 and died of acute barbiturate poisoning.
  

 



Isabel Jewell appeared in more than 100 movie and television roles during her career. After her death she was buried in her hometown of Shoshone, Fremont County, Wyoming.