Iva Stewart

A Miss America contender, Iva Stewart had a fresh, simple beauty that was more in vogue in the 1940s than in the 1930s. Perhaps she simply came too early, perhaps for some other reasons, her acting career took some time to get steam, but she managed to nab minor Broadway roles, and ultimately she was summoned to Hollywood. Once in Tinsel town, despite having a passion for acting and studying the dramatic arts with esteemed tutors, her movie a career went nowhere fast. She retired to become a housewife. Let’s learn more about her!

EARLY LIFE

Iva Barbara Stewart was born on January 5, 1914, in Berlin, New Hampshire, to John Alexander Stewart and Georgia Wheeler. She was the oldest of three children – her siblings were Marjorie May, born in 1920, and John, born on November 25, 1921. Her father, born in Canada, was a steam fitter for iron and metal sheets works.

The family moved to Herbon, Maine when Iva was a girl, and Iva grew up in Hebron and later Bath, Maine. After graduating from high school, Iva worked as a telephone operator. Dreaming of more glamorous things for herself Iva, got her start toward an eventual screen career by winding a beauty contest in Auburn, Maine. She did not pass unnoticed, and Iva decided to join the “Miss Maine” contest. Quelle suprise, she won the “Miss Maine” title, and was a contender in the “Miss America” national beauty contest in 1934. While she did not win, Iva became a runner-up and got major media coverage.

Buoyed by her success on the beauty pageant circuit, Iva moved to New York and started to work as a photographer’s model, but with her eyes on being an actress. by night, she studied dramatic art, and almost starved for months before getting a Job in a night spot. This job connected to to other showbiz people, and she had minor parts in several Broadway shows. But the money from acting was tights, and she had to constantly keep up modelling on the side.

Luck finally came Iva’s way when she and four other models were seen by a talent scout, and signed to a stock contract. That was a funny story, Because the girls vowed to seek film success together, and as destiny had it, they were all signed at the same time! To make things even funnier, all four were cast in the same movie the week after they arrived to Los Angeles from New York. The girls, except for Iva were, Elizabeth Palmer, Irma Wilson and Alice Armand. Sadly, none of them was to achieve any great cinematic success. But their careers started!

CAREER

Iva was always uncredited, or played totally minor roles in movies, but she managed to stick out for a few years in Hollywood, not a bad feast in itself. Allegedly Iva first appeared in Thin Ice, a Sonja Henie movie. As I already mentioned countless time on this blog, Henie movies were colorful and nice looking, but with thin characters and plot, so I’m not a big fan. Later she appeared in another Henie movie, Second Fiddle, which is just a rehash from countless other Henie movies. A much better movie  isThe Baroness and the Butler, a witty, sparking 30s comedy with William Powell and Annabella, where Powell plays the butler who becomes a parliament member and fights his mater’s politics head on.

It was time for some wacky comedy with the Ritz brothers showcase, Kentucky Moonshine, with Tony Martin playing the dashing romance lead. In the similar vein was a Jones family movie, Safety in Numbers, and a Mr. Moto movie, Mr. Moto Takes a Vacation. You watch these movies if you like the movie series it belong to, and while anyone can probably enjoy it to a degree, it’s simply not outstanding enough to warrant watching as a stand-alone. Iva then appeared in a dramatic weepie, Always Goodbye, with Barbara Stanwyck and Herbert Marshall, about a woman who ditches the man she loves to marry a man who adopted the child she left at birth years ago. As you can see, very soapy but old Hollywood sure knew how to make it work! Another A class movie that Iva appeared was Star Dust, where young Linda Darnell plays a wannabe actress that managed to climbs the Hollywood ladder, but at what cost? Funny that the movie is semi autobiographical, with Linda’s experiences serving as the basis for some moments.

Iva appeared in a string of B movies. There were adventures, like The Three Musketeers (I think we all know the plot of this one, plus there are the Ritz brothers, and I quite like it!), Sharpshooters, with Brian Donvely trying to save a prince of a small kingdom from losing his throne, and It Could Happen to You, a light crime movie about a wife trying to prove the innocence of her husband, played by Gloria Stuart and Stu Erwin.

There were plenty of light comedies to go around. Three Blind Mice is about three sisters who want to nab rich husbands, with Loretta Young in the leading role. A typical romcom, but oh so charming you cannot help but watch it! Among them was the aptly named Wife, Husband, and Friend, where the roles are taken over by Loretta Young, Warner Baxter and Binnie Barnes. Loretta is a socialite that wants to sing but hardly has the voice for it, but her husband, played by Baxter has, and of course, there is the friend who perhaps has less than honorable goals. Similarly named Boy friend is a Jane Withers comedy, a movie theoretically in the same genre, but made for a different audience and a totally different style. Interesting to compare this movie that were both comedies, but pretty much more than a bit apart when you look at it. Iva had the honor of appearing in another one of Jane Withers comedies, High School, about, you guessed it, high schoolers and their tempestuous love lives.

Iva appeared in two of Alice Faye movies. Hollywood Cavalcade is a historical movie about early Hollywood, with Alice and Don Ameche, her frequent co-sar. Then came Little Old New York, with Alice and Fred MacMurray, about the early ages of steamships on the large rivers. She also appeared in a Shirley Temple movie, Young People, about a family that goes to live on a New England farm after living in the city for very long. Always a plus is seeing the hilarious Charlotte Greenwood in any role!

Iva also appeared in a few oddities (as far as her filmography goes), like 20, 000 Men a Year, an aviation movie with Randolph Scott playing a pilot who opens up a piloting school, Girl in 313, a Florence Rice movie about a detective who falls in love with a thief from a gang, and Free, Blonde and 21 is exaxtly what the title says – young girls making their living (some fairly, some not) while cohabiting a hotel.

That was all from Iva!

PRIVATE LIFE

Iva was taunted as a beauty that was fresh and unsophisticated. In her prime, she was five feet two, weighted 108 pounds, had blue eyes and dark blond hair. Iva really tries to catapult her career via PR, but this didn’t quite work out the way she wanted to.

Here is a sweet bit of fluff about young 20th century fox actresses, Iva included:

TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX keeps under contract about a $core of pretty young girls prospective stars – who are serving an apprentice ship by playing I background bits. On a set every day for weeks, they appear before the camera in perhaps five or six scenes. It is a lazy life thirty minutes work out of an eight- hour day. A few weeks ago, Iva Stewart, a blond miss who looks surprisingly like Madeleine Carroll, proposed that they should spend their leisure set time knitting for charity. There has been quite a bit of laughter at their expense for it is incongruous to see bejeweled beauties plying knitting needles on a nightclub set. But the girls last month presented thirty-three sweaters to a Los Angeles orphanage. There is nothing funny in that.

At that time, Iva attended 20th Century-Fox’s dramatic school where young stock players receive training all year round under the tutelage of superb actress Florence Eldridge. Iva was quite aware of her dramatic shortcomings, as this newspaper bit can attest:

If anyone still dines on the moth-eaten myth that ambitious actresses in Hollywood,” work more than the press agents, they are right. “Miss Stewart finished her first leading role yesterday, and this morning she started to take drama lessons.” “That’s not ambition,” piped up Miss Stewart, “I saw the rushes.”

However, working in movies was far from an easy, breezy job, as we today know. The conditions on classic Hollywood sets were probably much worse than they are today, and Iva had her share of traums there. There is another bit about her:

Iva Stewart, Twentieth Century-Fox beauty, whose metal cloth gown caught fire “the other day when it trail d across a switch box, lives the experience over and over gain in memory. … It has shaken her nerve to the point hat she is entering a Glendale rest home

Here is another quite macabre things that happened to Iva:

Paper Iva Stewart, 20th Century-Fox contract player, opened her hometown paper, from Bath, Me., and read of the sad death in New York of Iva Stewart, who had shown great promise of a career in motion pictures. But Iva was 3000 miles away, in Hollywood, very much alive and surprised. A quick exchange of telegrams and the matter was cleared up. Another local girl named Iva, a dancer, passed away in New York; the similarity in names caused the confusion. Iva showed much evidence of life at the 20th Century-Fox studios, where she has just finished work- day

There pretty weird happenings, combined with a constant lack of any professional successful, finally made Iva give up her acting dreams in 1940. Also, before she left Hollywood, in about 1939, Iva married Bernard Brukholder, who worked in the salt packaging industry as a supervisor. Brukholder was born in Woodbine, Iowa on August 28, 1907, first lived in New York in the late 20s and early 30s, and came to California in about 1936, and found work as dog food salesman.

The couple settled in Los Angeles, and had two children, Richard, born on June 7, 1941,  and Judy Anne, born on February 8, 1945. Iva and her family enjoyed a simple life outside of the limelight.

Iva Stewart Burkholder died in March 1985, in Los Angeles, California.