Ann Harding: Hollywood Actress (1902–1981)

Ann Harding, actress, was born Dorothy Walton Gatley at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio on August 7, 1902. One of two children (she had an older sister named Edith) born into a military family, her mother was Elizabeth “Bessie” Walton (Crabb) Gatley, daughter of a career U.S. Army officer. Her father was Capt. George Grant Gatley, who served as commander of the Seventeenth Field Artillery Battery during the Moro Rebellion in the Philippines (1902–13) and later served in the punitive Pancho Villa expedition (1916–17), led by Gen. John J. Pershing. During World War I Gatney commanded the Fifty-fifth and Sixty-seventh Field Artillery Brigades. He retired as a brigadier general.

The family moved frequently due to her father’s military service. “Before I was thirteen years old I had attended thirteen different schools,” she once claimed. For one year she attended the Baldwin School in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, where she acted in her first play, a school production of Macbeth, directed by actress Maude Durbin and featuring her daughter Cornelia Otis Skinner. She graduated from East Orange High School in New Jersey then attended Bryn Mawr College for one year.

Dorothy Gatley moved to New York and supported herself as a clerk at the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company while she moonlighted as a script reader for Famous Players-Lasky. At the insurance firm, she polished her diction while working with Dictaphone cylinders. She soon became involved with the Provincetown Players, a Cape Cod theater group that had begun to produce plays in Greenwich Village. Due to her father’s disapproval of her career choice, she used the stage name Ann Harding. Her first stage credit for the Provincetown Players came in 1921 for Inheritors by Susan Glaspell. Later that year she made her Broadway debut in John Hunter Booth’s Like a King.

During the 1920s Harding continued to appear in Broadway plays while also acting in regional theaters in locales such as Pittsburgh and Detroit. Along the way, she met actor Harry Bannister, whom she wed on October 21, 1926. After they moved to Hollywood, they appeared together in Her Private Affair (1929) and The Girl of the Golden West (1930). Their daughter Jane was born in 1929, and the couple divorced in 1932.

Harding’s most significant involvement in regional theater was with the Hedgerow Theatre in the Philadelphia suburb of Rose Valley. Hedgerow, still active, is considered the oldest resident repertory theater in America. In 1924 she first appeared there for founder Jasper Deeter, whom she had met when both were with the Provincetown Players. In 1931 she purchased the theater and donated it to the company.

From 1927 to 1928 Harding appeared on Broadway in the title role of Bayard Veiller’s The Trial of Mary Dugan, which ran for 437 performances before going on tour. In 1927 Hollywood inaugurated the sound era with The Jazz Singer, the first feature-length talkie film. Thereafter stage-trained actors were in demand, and more movies based on plays were produced. Her reputation boosted by a hit play, Harding was in an ideal position to launch a film career. Test recordings of her voice were a success, and she was photogenic. In particular, she was renowned for her waist-length blond hair, which was often pinned into a bun. From the beginning, she was cast in leading roles. 

Norma Shearer had the title role when The Trial of Mary Dugan was adapted to film in 1929, but that year Harding made her debut in Hollywood with Fredric March in Paris Bound, an adaptation of Philip Barry’s Broadway play. Just one year later Harding was prominent enough to leave her handprints and footprints in cement at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. The ceremony took place on August 30, 1930, in connection with the film Holiday (1930), another Philip Barry adaptation. The film was a romantic comedy in which she co-starred with Mary Astor and for which she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.

Working steadily through the 1930s, Harding appeared regularly opposite many of Hollywood’s most popular leading men: Devotion with Leslie Howard and Prestige with Adolphe Menjou and Melvyn Douglas in 1931; Westward Passage with Laurence Olivier, The Conquerors with Richard Dix, and The Animal Kingdom with Leslie Howard in 1932; When Ladies Meet with Robert Montgomery, Double Harness with William Powell, The Right to Romance with Robert Young, and Gallant Lady with Clive Brook in 1933; The Life of Vergie Winters with John Boles and The Fountain with Brian Aherne and Paul Lukas in 1934; Biography of a Bachelor Girl with Robert Montgomery, The Flame Within with Herbert Marshall, and Peter Ibbetson with Gary Cooper in 1935; and The Lady Consents with Herbert Marshall in 1936. In 1936 she went to England, where she starred with Basil Rathbone in Love from a Stranger (1937), released in the United States as A Night of Terror, and appeared in a West End production of George Bernard Shaw’s Candida.

While in London, on January 17, 1937, Harding married composer–conductor Werner Janssen. She returned to Hollywood after Janssen was hired to compose film scores. The couple remained married until divorcing in 1963. 

Back in Hollywood, Harding resumed her movie career with Eyes in the Night (1942). It was a more mature role—she turned forty that year—as were her subsequent film appearances. Notable among her credits during World War II were Mission to Moscow and The North Star in 1943. The pro-Soviet Union approach of these two propaganda films came under scrutiny after the Cold War began. In 1956, her final year in feature films, she appeared in The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit with Fredric March, with whom she made her Hollywood debut in 1929. She played his wife in both films.

Harding migrated to television. Though she never had a lead role in a series, she amassed forty-three episode credits from 1951 through 1965. In between film and television roles, Harding continued her stage career. She appeared occasionally on Broadway and in regional theater productions. In the summer of 1964 she also served as a guest lecturer in drama at Eastern New Mexico University.

Harding spent her retirement in the Sherman Oaks section of the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles. She died on September 1, 1981, “after a long illness” and was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in the Hollywood Hills.

Harding received two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. One, at 6201 Hollywood Boulevard, acknowledges her film work; the other, located at 6850 Hollywood Boulevard, recognizes her television work. Both stars were unveiled on February 8, 1960. Harding was posthumously inducted into the East Orange Hall of Fame in 2018. A plaque installed at Hedgerow Theatre memorializes her career.