‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ actress to host movie screening
She also will appear in the play at the Fisher
When she took the role of Scout — for which she was nominated for an Oscar — in the classic 1962 film, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Mary Badham had no prior acting experience.
“The director of the Town & Gown Theatre (in Birmingham, Alabama, informed my mother that) he had movie people coming in for (‘Mockingbird’) and she ought to bring me in,” recalled Badham, 71, of Virginia. “She said: ‘Little Mary doesn’t know anything about acting. She’s just a normal kid. I’ll have to ask my husband and he’ll say no,’ which he did. But my mother was pretty sharp and told my father, ‘What are the chances the child will get the part anyway?’” Famous last words. “Mockingbird” casting director Boaty Boatwright and producer Alan J. Pakula were looking for real children, not child actors. Many kids who auditioned were actors and would-be actors who did monologues, according to Badham. Meanwhile, she went onstage and just played around on the set.
“I guess that’s what they were looking for,” Badham said. “So the rest is history.”
Based on Harper Lee’s 1960 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name, Badham portrayed tomboy Jean Louise Finch, alias Scout, the narrator, who is the daughter of widowed attorney Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck in his Oscar-winning role). It also marked the film debut of future Oscar winner Robert Duvall (“Apocalypse Now”). Occurring in fictional Maycomb, Alabama, during the 1930s, Atticus must defend a Black man named Tom Robinson, who is falsely accused of raping a white woman named Mayella Ewell, which exacerbates racial tensions in the town.