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With Madame Curie, the new cinematic element embodied by Miss Garson is finally isolated. The Ideal Woman is at last presented in simple cinemapotheosis. Greer Garson is Her greatest, indeed Her exclusive, Prophet.
Baby Bluestocking. A somewhat precocious child was mother to this Ideal Woman. Little Miss Garson was high-strung, bronchitic, given to fainting spells, and ill at ease with her nasty little peers (who called her Ginger). At an age when the average young Neanderthaler is spelling out "I HATE BOOKS," Greer was already too old for Alice in Wonderland. She sprinkled her porridge with table talk from succés d'estime like Colley Gibber and His Circle. "I was," she recalls, "rather a stuffy child."
At the University of London, which she swooped through in three years (on scholarships and with honors), Greer played in amateur theatricals. Her college yearbook thumbnailed her as "a unique blend of La Belle Dame Sans Merci and Goldilocks and the Three Bears." This unique blend returned from a year's study at Grenoble with a passionate desire to become an actress. Cried her Presbyterian grandmother: "No granddaughter of mine will ever lift her legs upon a stage." So Greer set up and operated a market research library for a London advertising firm, soon rated a respectable £10 a week.
One day she wangled a letter to the business manager of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. Miss Garson strong-armed him into starting her at £4 a week instead of £3. For two years she played leads. After that, Greer did walk-ons and held garlands in highly respectable and futureless productions of Shakespeare in Regent's Park Open Air Theatre. She was about to leave the theater a suicide note and go back to Commerce. But one night, while Greer was in the bleak gentility of The University Women's Club, high-glazed, handsome Authoress Sylvia Thompson (The Hounds of Spring) sauntered over and said: "I've been watching you all through dinner; are you by any chance an actress? It's ridiculous, I hardly know you; but I feel you're exactly the person we want."
Popcorn and Ping-Pong. Two years later, Greer Garson was one of the most promising young British actresses of her generation. She shared a handsome flat with her handsome mother in brightest Mayfair. She swapped fancy conversational popcorn with Bernard Shaw, was friend, colleague and mental ping-pong partner of people like Noel Coward, Sylvia Thompson, Laurence Olivier, Margaret Webster. In two years, during which she had only two weeks' vacation, she worked in no fewer than eight plays. Nearly all of them were flops. But Miss Garson was never a flop. She had ability. She had presence. She had a ferocious and exacting belief in herself. And she had an almost pathological need for continuous hard work. Envious inferiors called her Ca-Reer Garson.
One night Fate scratched timorously at Ca-Reer Garson's dressing-room door. There was a man to see her. "If it's stockings," called Miss Garson, "I don't want any." "Beggin' your pardon, Miss," said the stage doorkeeper, "He's from Mr. Mayer." "Hyphens and all?" gasped Miss Garson.