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The Christmas classics come to life with actors we have grown to know and love. They help warm our hearts as we make room in the inn of our souls, so filled with distractions, benign and not-so-benign, for the baby Jesus.
And, while we don’t really know these actors, one thing we do know is this: Far from cut-outs, they were human beings with the same struggles as every ordinary person making their way through life. Yet, they have been given something truly special enabling them, in turn, to gift the world with extraordinary creative performances, catapulting them to “fame and fortune.”
Which makes their struggles all the more challenging, and the need for extraordinary grace, essential.
Recognizing the hand of Providence
Regarding that something special catapulting them to Hollywood’s pinnacle, Gary Cooper once summed it up:
No player ever rises to prominence solely on talent. They’re molded by forces other than themselves. They should remember this — and at least twice a week drop to their knees and thank Providence for elevating them from cow ranches, dime store ribbon counters and bookkeeping desks.
Those forces are the work of Providence, and when you look closely at their seemingly charmed lives, you realize how these forces played out in the midst of lives that are anything but — molding them into stars.
Below are three examples.
Alec Guiness: finding a home in the Church
Take for instance Sir Alec Guinness, who famously played Jacob Marley’s ghost in Scrooge, the 1970 film adaptation of Dicken's A Christmas Carol. Born in 1914 in Maida Vale, London, he never knew who his father was and endured a cruel stepfather and a defect-laden mother.
Acting, he found, was a liberating refuge from this dismal reality in which, besides sporting three different names in his formative years, he also lived, he wrote, “in about thirty different hotels, lodgings and flats, each of which was hailed as ‘home’ until such time as my mother and I flitted, leaving behind, like a paperchase, a wake of unpaid bills.”
Then, too, the Catholic faith to which he converted at age 42, was his ultimate refuge — his ‘reconciliation’ coming just before he was scheduled to leave for Sri Lanka to begin filming The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), his third film with David Lean.
Bob Hope: “prayed” into the Church by his wife
Then there is Bob Hope. Originally christened Lester, he made his way to America from England with his family in 1908. They were following his father, a stonemason and heavy drinker who had fallen on hard times.
Some two decades later, after enduring grueling obstacles, Hope was gaining a foothold as an entertainer of note. A decade later, he would break into films, making 54 theatrical features including The Lemon Drop Kid. In this hit comedy, the “Kid” (Hope) is forced to repay $10,000 to a gangster, celebrating the spirit of Christmas and people willing to part with their money!
All the while his wife Dolores, a devout Catholic, was praying him into the Church. Against all odds, in 1993, when he became a nonagenarian, he also converted and finally settled down to some loving, quiet years with his wife.
Hope had maintained such a peripatetic schedule that when he and Dolores were celebrating their 50th, Bob quipped, “Yeah, but I’ve only been home three weeks.” To mark that half-century, she gave him a paperweight inscribed, “Don’t think these three weeks haven’t been fun.”
Gary Cooper: recognizing God’s hand in his life
Cooper, too, became a Catholic after a life of indulgence, epitomized by his trip to Cuba during the Christmas of 1950. He was seeking Ernest Hemingway’s blessing over his plans to divorce his wife and marry actress Patricia Neal, 25 years his junior. Hemingway refused, as revealed in newly released Hemingway’s Faith.
Cooper’s all-American, do-right image was solidified in movies like Meet John Doe, another classic Christmas film by the deeply Catholic Frank Capra. By decade’s end, Coop had also warmed up to religion, telling Hollywood reporter Ruth Waterbury in 1959:
I’d spent all my waking hours…doing almost exactly what I, personally, wanted to do and what I wanted to do wasn’t always the most polite thing either.… This past winter I began to dwell a little more on what’s been in my mind for a long time (and thought), “Coop, old boy, you owe somebody something for all your good fortune.
I guess that’s what started me thinking seriously about my religion. I’ll never be anything like a saint. I know. I just haven’t got that kind of fortitude. The only thing I can say for me is that I’m trying to be a little better. Maybe I’ll succeed.
Conversion doesn’t just happen in Christmas movies
Guinness, Hope, and Cooper all show that conversion isn’t just a plot device in a Christmas movie like Scrooge, but something that really happens – spreading the “Good News” of Christmas to others.
In fact, Patricia Neal, too, eventually became a Catholic guided by the steady friendship of Maria Cooper Janis, beloved daughter of Cooper, and her close friend Mother Dolores Hart.
(Note: Maria Cooper Janis graciously wrote the foreword to Hemingway’s Faith.)
These are but a glimmer of the souls behind some of Hollywood’s Christmas classics. A glimmer that brings to life the gift of Christmas — the gift of Christ in our hearts and souls, in which He takes life’s forces and shapes us into works of art — into saints!
