In further adventures of “the studios suck,” the studios—and if Louise Beavers was under contract, I can’t find out with whom—required her to eat extra portions. After all, she had to be kept fat, because that’s the image we have of friendly black maids. What’s more, she was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and moved to Pasadena, California, as a child. She had to learn the Southern dialect she was expected to use. People would’ve been perfectly happy to hire her as a maid using her real accent, they wouldn’t accept her playing a maid with it.

She is one of the few black actresses of her time whom you might remember in a dramatic role—while she is fourth-billed in Imitation of Life, she is generally considered to hold a second-lead position in the movie, certainly more important to the plot than Claudette Colbert’s tepid love interest. Even at the time, people observed that the Academy wouldn’t recognize Beavers (this was five years before Hattie McDaniel won for Gone With the Wind), and it’s certainly the sort of role that, in a white woman, would have provided more options for dramatic performances. Not for Beavers.

You see, the movie for which I know her most, Shadow of the Thin Man, is seven years later, and she’s a maid. Perhaps you know her from Holiday Inn, where she’s a maid. 1948’s Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, where she’s a maid. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her last film, 1960’s The Facts of Life, with Bob Hope and Lucille Ball, but from a quick glance, she appears to play the maid. Or perhaps you prefer television! Her thirty-three episodes of Beulah, a revolutionary TV show actually about a black woman—who is, of course, a maid. At least in her four episodes of Swamp Fox, I’m pretty sure she’s not explicitly called a slave?

It was a real problem. One she recognized as well; how not? She and other black performers had to make the decision about whether, as Hattie McDaniel, to play maids or be maids. She initially hadn’t wanted to get into Hollywood in the first place, because “they never used colored people for anything except savages.” Even today, I’m not sure a woman of her build—even without the studio-ordained fattening—could have found much work. Possibly she could find less work now that there aren’t many calls for maid characters.

There are three women whom I will always remember as being the Great Maids of the ’30s and ’40s. McDaniels was the one fortunate enough to have played the one Mammy character with a shot at winning an Oscar. Beavers had a slightly longer career, dying ten years to the day after McDaniels. It’s observed that she played a lot of cooks and hated to cook; that’s Hollywood for you, I suppose. The shame of it is that there still aren’t a lot of roles where a woman who looked like her wouldn’t have to cook. Probably not even if she were playing a Sassy Black Friend.

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