Glenda Farrell was the oldest of three children born in Enid to a Irish-Cherokee horse trader and his theatrically ambitious wife. With their mother’s encouragement, Glenda and her two brothers all ended up working in Hollywood – Gene as a cameraman and Richard as a film and TV editor. But it was Glenda who became the star.
At age seven, Glenda made her theatrical debut as Little Eva in a Wichita production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, where the family had relocated from Oklahoma. In her early teens the Farrells moved to California where Glenda joined prominent stock companies in San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco. She married a World War I navy veteran at 16 and had a son, but the marriage didn’t last, and her mother offered to care for the child while Glenda pursued a Broadway stage career. Just two weeks after her 1928 arrival in New York, Glenda had landed a leading role in an established play and was on her way.
Though she played a bit part in a film for New York-based Tiffany Productions, and made her Hollywood debut as the dancer-girlfriend of reluctant gangster Douglas Fairbanks Jr. in LITTLE CAESAR (1931), it was Glenda’s performance as a brash, pregnant show-girl who wants to sell her baby in the Broadway drama Life Begins that really launched her movie career. Warner Bros. invited Glenda to recreate her role in their 1932 film version of the play and were so impressed they signed her to a seven-year contract.
At Warners, Glenda was constantly in demand, sometimes working on as many as four films at the same time. Early on her parts were somewhat diverse. She blackmailed and betrayed Paul Muni in I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG (1932), investigated missing bodies in MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM (1933), and ran a boisterous nightclub in Frank Capra’s LADY FOR A DAY (1933) on loan to Columbia.
Glenda had her first leading role in GIRL MISSING (1933), playing a gold-digger alongside friend and Oklahoma City-native Mary Brian. Her characterization was so successful, it stuck, and Glenda was soon playing wisecracking blondes out to land a rich husband in WE’RE IN THE MONEY (1935) and GOLD DIGGERS OF 1935 and 1937, frequently alongside another popular Warners wisecracker, Joan Blondell. Her performance as a hard-boiled newspaper woman in SMART BLONDE (1936) led to a series of mystery-adventure films starring her character, Torchy Blane, and Glenda played the fast-talking reporter who solved crimes quicker than her police detective boyfriend in six more TORCHY BLANE films before her contract with Warners expired in 1939. Exhausted after appearing in more than 50 films over seven years, Glenda returned to the stage.
Though occupied primarily with her New York-based stage and TV work, as well as a successful marriage to surgeon and West Point graduate Henry Ross, Glenda returned to California to visit her family and played occasional character parts in movies throughout the 1940s and ‘50s. Most memorably, she tried to get gangster Robert Taylor to lay off her policeman husband in JOHNNY EAGER (1942), and to prevent daughter Kim Novak from marrying Fredric March in MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT (1959). Continuing on the stage through the late 1960s, Glenda died after a long illness at the age of 66 and is the only actress buried at West Point.