Julie Haydon (born Donella Donaldson, June 10, 1910 – December 24, 1994)[1] was an American Broadway, film and television actress who received second billing as the female lead in the Ben Hecht–Charles MacArthur 1935 film vehicle for Noël Coward, The Scoundrel. After her Hollywood career ended in 1937, she turned to the theatre, originating the roles of Kitty Duval in The Time of Your Life (1939) and Laura Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie (1945).
Early career and films
Born in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, to Orin Donaldson, a newspaper publisher, and Ella Horton,[2] Haydon began her acting career when she was 19, studying with Neely Dickson at the Hollywood Community Theater.[3] She then toured with Minnie Maddern Fiske in Mrs. Bumstead Leigh. Within two years, she played Ophelia in a production of Hamlet at the Hollywood Playhouse.
Shortly after, she began appearing in films, in 1931. Her first film, in which she was billed under her birth name, was The Great Meadow, a Johnny Mack Brown Western drama made by MGM. In 1932, she signed with RKO,[4] and her first major role came that year in The Conquerors, directed by William Wellman[citation needed] Her most notable performance[4] came in 1935's The Scoundrel playing opposite Noël Coward,[citation needed] but, despite a new contract with MGM,[5] only a few more films were to come in her short career, including A Family Affair (1937), the initial movie in the Andy Hardy series.
Some people, including Haydon,[6] have held that it was Haydon and not Fay Wray who provided the heroine's bone-chilling screams in 1933's King Kong, but this claim is disputed.[7]
In 1955, at the age of 45, Haydon married 73-year-old drama criticGeorge Jean Nathan who died three years later. She never remarried and worked as a drama coach as well as appearing onstage in community theater and college productions. She delivered lectures taken from books written by Nathan, two collections of which Haydon edited. She also wrote occasional magazine articles about the actors she had worked with in her career.[4]
Haydon recorded two albums for Folkways Records in the early 1960s, George Jean Nathan's The New American Credo (1962) and Colette's Music Hall (L'Envers du Music-Hall): By Colette (1963).
In 1962, the actress left New York City and returned to the Midwest. For a decade, she was actress in residence at the College of St. Teresa in Winona, Minnesota. She played the role of Amanda Wingfield in revivals of The Glass Menagerie, and in 1980, returned to New York to perform the role off-off-Broadway.
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