Author: [20th Century Photographer]
Title: Fredric March and Norma Shearer. (Scene from "Smilin' Through")
Description: London: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, [Ca. 1932]. Original hand colored real photograph issued as a postcard. 5.5 x 3.5 inches. Very Good+. Printed on verso: "Film Partners" Series, 85, Long Acre, London; No. PC 96. Made in Great Britain. Smilin' Through is a 1932 American pre-Code MGM romantic drama film based on the 1919 play by Jane Cowl and Jane Murfin, also named Smilin' Through. The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture for 1932. It was adapted from Cowl and Murfin's play by James Bernard Fagan, Donald Ogden Stewart, Ernest Vajda and Claudine West. The movie was directed by Sidney Franklin and starred Norma Shearer, Fredric March, Leslie Howard and Ralph Forbes. The film was a remake of an earlier 1922 silent version also directed by Sidney Franklin which starred Norma Talmadge. Fredric March (born Ernest Frederick McIntyre Bickel; August 31, 1897 - April 14, 1975) was an American actor, regarded as "one of Hollywood's most celebrated, versatile stars of the 1930s and 1940s". He won the Academy Award for Best Actor for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) and The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), as well as the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play for Years Ago (1947) and Long Day's Journey into Night (1956). March is one of only two actors, the other being Helen Hayes, to have won both the Academy Award and the Tony Award twice. Edith Norma Shearer (August 10, 1902 - June 12, 1983) was a Canadian-American actress who was active on film from 1919 through 1942. Shearer often played spunky, sexually liberated ingénues. She appeared in adaptations of Noël Coward, Eugene O'Neill and William Shakespeare, and was the first person to be nominated five times for an Academy Award for acting, winning Best Actress for her performance in The Divorcee (1930). Reviewing Shearer's work, Mick LaSalle called her "the exemplar of sophisticated 1930s womanhood .. exploring love and sex with an honesty that would be considered frank by modern standards". As a result, Shearer is celebrated as a feminist pioneer, "the first American film actress to make it chic and acceptable to be single and not a virgin on screen.

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