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No female star of the classic Hollywood era made a stronger feminist impression than Rosalind Russell, who was noted in the 1940s for a series of “boss lady” films like Take a Letter, Darling (1942) in which she was very in charge and swaggered around and treated men as sex objects and hired help. Both Russell and Katharine Hepburn made movies about female achievement in this time that were so specialized that they feel like fantasies for women, but they both offered images that led the way to these fantasies becoming a reality because they were so obviously capable of handling CEO positions of authority.

How did Russell get away with presenting in such a feminist way in the 1940s? Because she was funny. Russell’s most famous movie, Howard Hawks’s His Girl Friday (1940), provides a portrait of a fast-talking born journalist who has nearly bought into what society has been telling her (that she should “settle down” and marry and have babies) but keeps herself very open underneath to being persuaded otherwise by an inconsiderate, ruthless, sexy editor (Cary Grant) who is her soulmate. Russell wears masculine pin-stripe suits in this picture but is photographed in close-up in a fairly soft manner, and she matches Grant’s high-speed delivery word for word and line for line, often getting her biggest laughs by throwing her funniest wisecracks away.

Russell was a performer who saw acting as a kind of contest where scenes could be won or lost, stolen or relinquished, and she would do practically anything for a laugh, even cross her eyes cartoonishly or do an ungainly pratfall, and this was in part a rebellion against her proper New England background, which she described in her very winning memoir Life Is a Banquet (1977). This instinct could get unseemly in her later years on screen where she throws aside ladylike gentility with a force that can feel too forceful, but this was a liberating thing, too, the way Russell was always lurching towards busy, pushy goonishness as part of what a woman might be.

Little Rosalind was a snob and a ham, and she loved making people laugh and always talked too loud, which drove her mother to distraction; aggressive from the start, still she was overshadowed by her sister Clara, who became a fashion editor and was a career woman like the heroines Russell later played on the screen. Russell trained at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and schemed her way into pictures, getting herself out of a bad Universal contract and settling in as a second lead at MGM, where she was used as a kind of threat to Myrna Loy even though they were entirely different types.

She idled for a while at MGM playing restrained other women but finally got a chance to show what she could do on loan-out to Columbia as the tyrannical, pragmatic homemaker Harriet Craig in Dorothy Arzner’s Craig’s Wife (1936). Russell turns her usually overactive face into a kind of mask for this movie and pitches her voice higher and makes it more precise to offer a tragic portrait of a woman who sublimates her own career drive to lead a totally false domestic life where the beauty of her home is her only security. When she plays held-down characters like this in the 1930s, Russell is very effective because we can feel all that she is holding down in herself—all her charismatic and managing Roz-ness—and what it costs her to keep that hidden. When Russell’s Harriet glances at a mirror, she is so painfully aware of how fake she is that she cannot stand to look at herself and has to shut her eyes.

In the last scene of Craig’s Wife, Russell lets the mask she has been wearing as Harriet Craig, with its long false eyelashes and careful make-up, collapse into ruins, and Arzner gets Russell so deeply involved in her role that a glimpse of her soul seems to be offered up to us. Craig’s Wife is a hyper-controlled masterpiece with a wide social context, and in it Russell proves that she can control her effects if she wants to, and she also reveals a kind of killer instinct that she only showed in flashes in some of her later comedies. Russell once told Jack Lemmon that acting was “standing up naked and turning around very slowly,” but Craig’s Wife is the only time on screen when she truly allows herself to appear emotionally naked to the camera while working for the only steadily employed female director of that classic Hollywood era.

She played another repressed character in the psychological thriller Night Must Fall (1937) and was a prim but impassioned schoolteacher and perfect wife to Robert Donat in The Citadel (1938), in which she was directed by King Vidor. In her memoir, Russell makes it clear how much she understands that she was at her best when she had a top director like Arzner, Vidor, and George Cukor, who made her a star in The Women (1939) by urging her to be as exaggerated and elemental as possible as the anti-social and destructive gossip Sylvia Fowler, a society woman who deliberately ruins the marriage of her cousin Mary Haines (Norma Shearer) out of jealousy and sheer spite and something else, something that can only be called evil.

Sylvia’s bad character could be explained in feminist terms, but there is an essential area of her that is unexplainable and purely malevolent, and this makes her scarier. Cukor knew that if Russell played this role in The Women seriously she would be hated and the movie would be too heavy, and so he had her clown it in a low comedy way that makes Sylvia’s malice entertaining yet deadly believable at the same time, Russell’s Roz-ness uncorked and running amok and annihilating anyone unlucky enough to be in her sights. “I hate everybody!” Sylvia finally cries after a physical brawl with the woman who has stolen her own husband (Paulette Goddard), and Russell hits a high note of misanthropy here in the midst of the most uninhibited slapstick.

It was The Women and His Girl Friday that made Russell into a star of the 1940s, and in addition to her boss lady pictures she did the appealing Greenwich Village story My Sister Eileen (1942) and the unconventional, near-plotless, overlooked Roughly Speaking (1945), in which Russell plays an archetypal go-getter American woman who is always hopeful of making it big but never lucky enough to get that brass ring she sees as her birthright: “I wouldn’t give up my job for any man living!” Russell cries here, and she really means it. There is a scene towards the end of this movie where Russell’s character looks at her lovably feckless second husband (Jack Carson) with a combination of good humor, anger, and acceptance that shows just how good she could be when she really dug deep.

Russell went in for high drama after World War II in the personal project Sister Kenny (1946), where she’ll indicate “I’m unsettled” with three-to-four huge shifts of her eyes, and Mourning Becomes Electra (1947), a faithful adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s epic play in which her comic instincts lead her to play her role as if she is doing a Carol Burnett parody of the material. In this period there didn’t seem to be any directors around to tell her to tone things down, and so Russell Roz-ed it up without aim or control.

As leading roles on film started to vanish for her in her early forties, Russell went back to the stage and triumphed in a tailor-made vehicle called Wonderful Town, a musical version of My Sister Eileen that was a highlight of that peak period on Broadway and was preserved in a cast album and a 1958 recording for TV. Russell returned to film to play the desperate schoolteacher Rosemary in a movie of William Inge’s Picnic (1955) and offered a very hammy performance that milked all the pathos dry from the role to a nearly contemptuous extent. Particularly painful here is the scene where Rosemary is made to beg a man (Arthur O’Connell) to marry her, which feels like a 1950s-era sexist punishment to Russell for playing all those women for whom a job was as important as a man and often more so, an attempt to undo the progress made for women in the 1930s and ‘40s.

Russell had an even bigger triumph on stage as the bohemian life force Auntie Mame, which was filmed in 1958 so faithfully that even the slow stage fade-outs between scenes were included. Russell does nothing to scale her performance back for film, and this is a good example of work that would be dynamite with a live audience but looks set, overly detailed, and performed in a vacuum to the camera. Her acting here is filled with mugging, stagy business, and line readings cast in stone, but it is all good fun of a particular camp kind.

Russell got one more plum opportunity on screen when her producer husband Frederick Brisson secured her the role of ultimate stage mother Momma Rose in Gypsy (1962), which she plays all-out for selfish menace and discreetly stubborn pathos in lots of green-with-envy clothes all the way up to the climactic number “Rose’s Turn,” which Russell doesn’t seem to understand and which she plays far too comedically and lightly; most of her songs were dubbed by Lisa Kirk, with the exception of “Mr. Goldstone” and the lion’s share of “Rose’s Turn.” Russell’s Rose is another of her pitiable monsters who is a monster because her career energy has been sublimated, and since Russell was the biggest scene hog of all time this fits the way Rose can never stay out of the act that she has created for her daughters.

Russell did a few more comedy vehicles after that, never descending to supporting roles or horror or anything that might tarnish her image of bossy and in-charge bravado. As her voice lowered, she leaned in to her style of doing all kinds of little “reactions” behind half-closed eyes when another actor was talking, as if she wanted to make certain that all eyes were on her at all times; she stylized herself much like Hepburn did, but in a much heavier, low-down sort of way, with an emphasis on knowing sidelong glances. As a young performer she was capable of underplaying for maximum effect, but as an older star Russell could overplay in a way that might stun a horse, as they used to say.

Russell suffered from rheumatoid arthritis by the mid-1960s and died in 1976, and surely she would have been at home in a 1970s or ‘80s sitcom with double takes and even some pratfalls if she had lived. (The episodic Auntie Mame seems ideal material for a series.) Taken all and all, Russell’s starring career is the strongest statement of her era for a woman’s need for a job and financial independence, and it covers the whole spectrum from Hildy Johnson’s lustful love of work in His Girl Friday to her series of heroine-bosses of the 1940s to women like Harriet Craig and Sylvia Fowler who have become vipers because they have been denied a place to put their professional energies by a sexist society that the ultra-authoritative Russell did more than her share to dismantle.

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