Shearer siblings brought home Oscars in 1930
Montrealers won for acting and sound recording after building themselves up from poverty
As Oscar night approaches, many Montrealers will be rooting for director Jean-Marc Vallée, whose Dallas Buyers Club is nominated for Best Picture.
Way back at the third Academy Awards, in 1930, local talent made history when a brother and sister from Montreal both took home statues.
Norma Shearer, who by then was already one of the great Hollywood glamour queens, won Best Actress for her portrayal of an unfaithful wife in The Divorcee. Her brother, Douglas Shearer, won Best Sound Recording for The Big House. It was the first year an award for sound was given out, and Douglas was a pioneer of the emerging medium who would go on to win more Oscars during a long career.
Norma and Douglas grew up in a luxurious house on Grosvenor Ave. in Westmount. But it was the poverty that followed the crash of the family business in 1919 that would propel the siblings to fame and fortune.
The Shearer name remains indelibly etched in Montreal history. The family had a lumber yard in PointeSt-Charles opened by their paternal grandfather during the early 1860s. Its location became known as Shearer Lane and later Shearer St.
With the family fortune gone, Norma and her sister Athole got modelling work in Montreal. Norma played piano in a sheet music store on Ste-Catherine St. But she had grander plans.
According to her 1983 obituary in The New York Times, Norma’s family sold the family dog to scrape together her train fare to New York.
Her first foray into the acting world failed. One strike against her was that she was slightly cross-eyed. She spent money the family could illafford on a therapist who cured her, sort of, but it remained noticeable in later scenes and photos.
During the early 1920s, Norma met producer Irving Thalberg, a rising
“He knew about sound when sound hadn’t been invented. He has made many stars with his achievements.”
SPENCER TRACY, ON DOUGLAS SHEARER
star at MGM Studios who became captivated with the young actor and helped her obtain better roles. According to his biographers, he had a chronic heart condition and a life expectancy of 30. In 1922, Thalberg and Norma followed the film industry’s migration from New York to Southern California. They married in 1927 and he died in 1936 at age 37.
As for Douglas, he had always been fascinated with gadgets. He studied engineering at McGill University until his impoverished father had no more money for tuition. He found work in a Ford dealership repair shop and eventually acquired a bank account large enough to finance the trip west to join his now wealthy sister.
There, he took up what in the mid-1920s was the futuristic notion of talking movies. It was Douglas’s innovations that made the movies what we’ve come to know. The audio mixing device needed for highfidelity sound became known as the Shearer Horn. He perfected the system by which recorded audio and video would be captured and married on a single reel, known as sound on film, rich with ambient and background sound his predecessors lacked. He redesigned the clunky and noisy old silent-era cameras so their sounds wouldn’t be picked up by the more sophisticated recording equipment.
When Douglas died in 1971, it was front-page news. The great actor Spencer Tracy paid a tribute to him: “He knew about sound when sound hadn’t been invented. He has made many stars with his achievements. … He’s a star himself, but he would never admit it.”
Norma retired in 1942 and married a ski instructor a decade her junior. In 1944, the Canadian government brought her back to her hometown for a War Bonds drive. Her loyal Montreal fans had not forgotten. Sixty thousand of them turned out in Westmount Park to see her. She lived in L.A. until her death in 1983.