The best thing you can say about Geraldine Brooks is that she was better than almost every movie she ever played in. She could hold her own against highly-strung co-starring divas as Joan Crawford and the volcanic Anna Magnani. Starting at 18 in a starring role in the long-running Broadway play Follow The Girls, she did nearly half of the 288 performances. Then she got hired by Hollywood to appear in movies, and in the best Hollywood tradition, she was totally undervalued. Only when she quit Hollywood to do Italian movies was she fully appreciated — and when those movies appeared in America, they were bowdlerized beyond recognition.
So… TV, from 1952 she settled for appearing on silly TV shows for another twenty-four years, her performances still always better than the shows themselves.
But enough of that.
Magical.
Reminds me of my mother in her 20s. (1951-60).
I have the Jim Hutton/ David Wayne Ellery Queen series. I’ll have to check out her last TV role in the episode, “The Adventure of the Chinese Dog.”