all the king's women #22 - glenda farrell

born June 30, 1904, in Enid, Oklahoma, Glenda Farrell's first professional acting role came at the tender age of 7, when she played Little Eva in a stock company production of Uncle Tom's Cabin. from there, Glenda continued in theatre, pausing at times to continue her education, while appearing with a number of theatrical companies and in several Broadway productions. Farrell came to Hollywood towards the end of the silent era, and in 1930, was signed to First National Pictures (a division of Warner Bros).

touted by many as the inventor of the wise-craking, fast talking, 'hard-boiled dame', Farrell made a total of 122 films during her career, many of which saw her playing some variation of this character. she and Joan Blondell, with whom she was frequently paired, came to personify the tough, uncompromising, undefeatable and somewhat dizzy blondes of the early talkies.



during the 1930s, Farrell was one of Warner Brothers’ most prolific actresses and even had her own film series, as Torchy Blane, "Girl Reporter". while promoting the Torchy Blane films, the studio boasted Glenda's ability to speak 400 words in 40 seconds :)

weary of being typecast, Farrell made a deft transition in the 1950s, to motherly roles, primarily on television. it is in this capacity that she lands herself here, in All the King's Women, for in 1964, this glamorous star of stage and screen appeared in one of the worst films of all time: Elvis' Kissin Cousins.

now you all know by now that i am a diehard Elvis fan, and that i genuinely do love most of the 33 pictures that he left to the world, but this is positively, indisputably one of the worst of 'em. in this comedy-o-incest there are in fact two Elvises, one of whom is blonde. Glenda, the hatted matriarch in the photo above, plays Ma Tatum, mother to the blonde one. her shining moment in the film is a bluesy duet sung in hillbillie dialect, accompanied by a hounddog (also pictured above).

Glenda was married three times. she had a son, Tommy Farrell, with her first husband who became a 'side-kick' actor in B-westerns. then came a brief marriage to Jack Durant of the Mitchell and Durant vaudeville team, an finally, in 1941, Glenda married Dr. Henry Ross, an army physician who served on General Eisenhower's staff.

Glenda retired from acting for a time, but boredom drove her back to the stage. while appearing in the play Forty Carats in 1969, Glenda was diagnosed with lung cancer. two years later, she died, at the age of 66 and was interred at the U.S. Military Academy Post Cemetery, in West Point, New York. twenty years later, in 1991, Dr. Henry Ross was buried beside her.