Fay Bainter
American actress (1893–1968)
Fay Okell Bainter (December 7, 1893 – April 16, 1968) was an American film and stage actress. She won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Jezebel (1938) and has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Other notable films include Make Way for Tomorrow (1937), Woman of the Year (1942), State Fair (1945), and The Children's Hour (1960)
Early life
Bainter was born in Los Angeles, California, the daughter of Charles F. Bainter and Mary Okell.
Career
Bainter made her first appearance on stage in 1908 in The County Chairman at Morosco's Burbank Theater, which was at 548-550 South Main Street, in Los Angeles, California. In 1910, she was a traveling stage actress. Her Broadway debut was in the role of Celine Marinter in The Rose of Panama (1912). P. G. Wodehouse, reviewing Turn to the Right in Vanity Fair in 1916, wrote, "Miss Bainter's advent from nowhere and her instant success form the season's biggest sensation." She appeared in a number of successful plays in New York, such as East Is West, The Willow Tree, and Dodsworth. In 1926, she appeared with Walter Abel in a Broadway production of Channing Pollock's The Enemy. MGM persuaded her to try films and her movie debut was in This Side of Heaven (February 1934). Also in 1934, she appeared in Dodsworth on Broadway and in the film It Happened One Day.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Fay Bainter” is american actress (1893–1968). The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Bainter, American and actress, not as a finished interpretation.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q152888. VIAF identifies the subject as 40866802. The Library of Congress control number is n86138580. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1893, 1968, 1938 and 1937.
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This entry incorporates text from “Fay Bainter” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.