Margaret Callahan

Biography

Not to be mistaken for a stage actress of that name (1890-1947), this Margaret Callahan was a convent-educated beauty of Irish ancestry who found herself briefly thrust into the spotlight as one of those many ornamental 1930s Hollywood ingénues. First on stage with the Stuart Walker stock company in Cincinnati, then in summer stock on Long Island, she eventually made it to Broadway in 1934 and was near top-billed in a couple of short-lived plays. Having attracted the attention of talent scouts, Margaret was signed by RKO the following year to star in Hot Tip (1935) (an agreeable racing comedy with Zasu Pitts and James Gleason), His Family Tree (1935) (a trite farce which invoked every Irish cliche in the book and flopped at the box-office) and Seven Keys to Baldpate (1935) (another remake of the classic, featuring Margaret as Gene Raymond's love interest). Easily the best of her sextet of films (despite its title) was the detective mystery Muss 'em Up (1936), a cleverly scripted minor film noir of the Raymond Chandler/Dashiell Hammett hard-boiled school, directed with some flair by Charles Vidor. Margaret co-starred opposite Preston Foster as the gal who sends the telegram which effectively puts events into motion. Her penultimate outing was Special Investigator (1936), another crime drama based on a story by Perry Mason creator Erle Stanley Gardner. It starred Richard Dix as a criminal defense attorney, the ever-versatile character actor J. Carrol Naish as a vicious gangster boss and Margaret as the latter's sister. Since the picture made a healthy profit of $91,000 at the box office, one cannot help wondering why Margaret's film career ended so abruptly after her swansong in a forgotten second feature western. The year 1941 saw her back on Broadway as star of the Lillian Hellman play Cuckoos of the Hearth at the Morosco Theatre. In 1944, she appeared in Ramshackle Inn, by that time no longer a headliner. After that, she faded from the scene.