Mary Badham, famous for playing “Scout” in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), is currently on tour with the stage version and has grown into playing the role of Mrs. Dubose.
The play recently came to my neck of the woods at the Bushnell in Hartford, Connecticut, but unfortunately, I was not able to attend. If you google the tour dates you might find it coming to “a theater near you.”
Richard Thomas, who famously played John-Boy Walton and, like Miss Badham, knows something about a fictional role in youth following an actor forever, plays Atticus Finch. In a recent interview of Mary Badham by Cori Urban for The (Springfield, Massachusetts) Sunday Republican, Badham praises Mr. Thomas in the role and as a cheerful castmate with “a great sense of humor.”
She is new to theater, and really hadn’t done much film work since her role as Jean Louise “Scout” Finch in the 1962 movie. For that role, at the age of ten, she earned a Best Supporting Actress nomination. She lost to Patty Duke, who at the ripe old age of 16, won for playing Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker. The year 1962 was a great year for movies. Consider the other nominees for just the category of Best Supporting Actress: Shirley Knight for Sweet Bird of Youth, Angela Lansbury for The Manchurian Candidate, and Thelma Ritter for Birdman of Alcatraz. You couldn’t go wrong with any of them.
I’ve never covered To Kill a Mockingbird in an essay on this blog yet, but I hope to remedy that someday. For now, let’s consider the interesting prospect of the evolution of a young actress playing a spirited, inquisitive tomboy whose widowed lawyer father takes on the town bullies to defend an innocent man to playing, in her senior years, an elderly woman who is one of those bullies.
Mrs. Dubose would be called a minor character, but only in the sense she has less time on screen/stage and less lines. Her being there is an important element to the story. She is rude, bigoted, says nasty things at passersby from the exalted realm of her front porch. (Scout calls her “the meanest old woman who ever lived.”) But she is granted leeway, if not respect, because of her age, and because she is ill. The novel, as novels will, gives us a little more.
When she turns her venom on Atticus for defending a Black man, Scout’s brother Jem is so enraged, he destroys her garden. But Atticus, wanting to teach his children to turn the other cheek, makes Jem read to the old lady as punishment and to make amends.
We find out that the old lady suffers greatly and is taking morphine for her pain but is weaning herself off the morphine in a streak of righteous independence, but it costs her, making her suffer more. She and Atticus are not unlike in this respect: his taking a stance for decency is costing him and his family.
We see the world of this small Southern town and its pleasures and pain, its guilt and its decency through the eyes of young Scout. Mary Badham’s performance in the movie was indelible, natural, and heartfelt, like a kid who was just feeling, skipping along, forgetting stuff, remembering stuff, and not acting at all. She and Gregory Peck, who played her father, Atticus, in the movie remained lifelong friends and she always called him Atticus when she saw him, and he always called her Scout.
Her connection with the film is like belonging to an honored society. She attended a screening of To Kill a Mockingbird to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the film in 2012 as a guest of President Barak Obama at the White House.
(Photo from National Tour by Julieta Cervantes)
How must it feel to her to relinquish the identify of Scout for Mrs. Dubose? It must be fascinating to play the role of a character so unlike herself. A stretch like that calls for real acting. Regarding bigotry, in her article Ms. Urban quoted Mary Badham, “It’s really sad that there are some people who still feel that way. I think in this day and time we need to lift each other up, take care of each other, love each other and not put each other down. That divisiveness is so wrong.”
Doesn’t sound like “the meanest old woman who ever lived.” Atticus, and eventually Jem and Scout, came to acknowledge Mrs. Dubose’s courage in facing the monster of addiction and the enemy of ill health.
If you are able to see this national tour of To Kill a
Mockingbird in your neck of the woods over the remainder of 2023 and 2024,
let me know your impressions. I’d love
to hear them.
Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Movies in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century and Hollywood Fights Fascism. Her latest book is Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.
