Margaret in Duck Soup

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Straight Lady: The Life and Times of Margaret Dumont, “The Fifth Marx Brother”

On October 20, 1882, future actress Margaret Dumont was born in Brooklyn, New York. Her mother was an entertainer who taught music, her father was a sea captain, and stepfather a set decorator for Broadway productions. She was forty-seven when she made her first movie with the Marx Brothers. Tall and regal in bearing, her character provided the perfect foil to wisecracking Groucho Marx.

Almost alone among the wooden heroines and third-rate bit players who peopled the Marx Brothers’ films with victims, she radiated a memorable vulnerability and eternally renewable faith in the chance of sanity in a lunatic world. In doing so she shared their immortality.

Here’s another love scene between Groucho as Rufus Firefly and Margaret Dumont as Gloria Teasdale from the film Duck Soup.

Firefly: Here are the plans of war. They’re as valuable as your life, and that putting ‘em pretty cheap. Watch them like a cat watches her kittens. Have you ever had kittens? No, of course not. You’re too busy running around playing bridge. Can’t you see what I’m trying to tell you? I love you. Why don’t you marry men?

Mrs. T: Why, marry you?

Firefly:  You take me and I’ll take a vacation. I’ll need a vacation if we’re going to get married. Married!

Mrs. T.: Rufus, what are you thinking of?

Firefly: Oh, I was just thinking of all the years I wasted collecting stamps. Oh, uh, I suppose you’ll think me a sentimental old fluff, but, uh, would you mind giving me a lock of your hair?

Mrs. T.: A lock of my hair? Why, I had no idea.

Firefly: I’m letting you off easy. I was going to ask for the whole wig.

To learn more about the talented actress and her life on and off screen with the comedy team read Straight Lady: The Life and Times of Margaret Dumont, “The Fifth Marx Brother.”