Andrea Leeds: Exited Via the “Stage Door”

To blink would be to miss the career of Andrea Leeds (Antoinette Lees, 1913-1984).

Leeds career blazed most brightly not long before she ended it, when she was nominated for an Oscar for her performance in Stage Door (1937). Today we tend to think of her as the actress we don’t recognize in an all-star ensemble that also includes Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers,Lucille Ball, Eve Arden, Ann Miller, and Gail Patrick. She went on take one of the leads in the all-star showcase The Goldwyn Follies (1938) and co-star with Don Ameche and Al Jolson in Swanee River (1939).

Leeds was the daughter of a mining engineer, born in Butte, Montana, raised mostly in Mexico, and educated at UCLA. She began playing bit parts and walk-ons in films in 1933. Her first movie was Meet the Baron (1933) with Baron Munchausen, and she was also in Dante’s Inferno (1935), Anna Karenina (1935), Magnificent Obsession (1936), Laurel and Hardy’sThe BohemianGirl (1936), and My Man Godfrey (1936). Her final film was the critically-panned ghost story Earthbound (1940) with Warner Baxter. By that time she had married into the family who owned the race horse “Seabiscuit”, and was all glad to quit the biz.