Rambeau was born in San Francisco. She had a sister.[3] Her parents separated when she was a child. Her mother and she went to Nome, Alaska, where young Marjorie dressed as a boy, sang, and played the banjo in saloons and music halls. Her mother insisted she dress as a boy to thwart amorous attention from drunken grown men in such a wild and woolly outpost as Nome.[4] She began performing on the stage at the age of 12. She attained theatrical experience in a rambling early life as a strolling player. Finally, she made her Broadway debut on March 10, 1913, in a tryout of Willard Mack's play, Kick In.[5]
Career
The Debt (1917)
In her youth, she was a Broadway leading lady, starring in plays such as the 1915 comedy Sadie Love. In 1921, Dorothy Parker memorialized her in verse:
If all the tears you shed so lavishly / Were gathered, as they left each brimming eye. / And were collected in a crystal sea, / The envious ocean would curl up and dry— / So awful in its mightiness, that lake, / So fathomless, that clear and salty deep. / For, oh, it seems your gentle heart must break, / To see you weep. ...[6]
Rambeau was descended from colonial immigrant Peter Gunnarsson Rambo,[8] who immigrated in the 1600s from Sweden to New Sweden and served as a justice of the Governor's Council. He was the longest living of the original settlers and became known as the "Father of New Sweden".[9]
Rambeau was married three times and had no children. She was first married in 1913 to Canadian writer, actor, and director Willard Mack. They divorced in 1917. She then married actor Hugh Dillman McGaughey in 1919, a marriage which also ended in divorce in 1923. Rambeau's last marriage was to Francis Asbury Gudger in 1931, with whom she remained until his death in 1967. Gudger was from Asheville, North Carolina. In the winter, they often stayed there, and in the summer, they lived in Sebring, Florida. His previous wife was killed in an automobile accident in Tampa two years before, but Rambeau and Gudger had been sweethearts years before when the former was the "toast of Broadway".[10]
In 1945, a truck struck the automobile Rambeau and her sister were in. Their car slammed into a tree, killing the latter. Rambeau sustained multiple injuries, including crushed legs and a possible skull fracture.[11] Doctors informed her she might never walk again, and she used a wheelchair for a year. Rambeau did recover and successfully returned to acting.[3]
↑Sobel, Bernard (1953). "Broadway Heartbeat: Memoirs of a Press Agent". New York City: Hermitage House: 233. OCLC1514676.{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
↑Brooks, Patricia; Brooks, Jonathan (2006). "Chapter 8: East L.A. and the Desert". Laid to Rest in California: a guide to the cemeteries and grave sites of the rich and famous. Guilford, CT: Globe Pequot Press. p.238. ISBN978-0762741014. OCLC70284362.
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