A Double Life
The first of George Cukor's films to be written by the team of Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, A Double Life is a curious “backstage” story that plays on the theater's potential for encouraging a Jekyll and Hyde syndrome in its actors. Ronald Colman is featured as a stage actor who, while playing Othello, finds the part taking over his personality. He becomes paranoiac and eventually commits murder. Shelley Winters appears in her first major film role as the waitress whom he murders. She effects an eroticism that is a Winters specialty: at once attractive and repellent, funny and slightly grotesque.