This golden age actress was led to the Church by Fulton Sheen

Virginia Mayo knew she was destined to be an actress from age six when she began studying at her aunt’s dance studio in her hometown of St. Louis, Missouri.

This great-great-great-granddaughter of Captain James Piggott -- a George Washington underling at Brandywine -- born Virginia Clara Jones 105 years ago today, would implore her childhood friends to “play show,” she said in Virginia Mayo: The Best Years of My Life (as told to LC Van Savage).

It was the roaring '20s. She soon began appearing in local theatrical shows. 

Then life took a turn. The Great Depression hit and her father, Luke Ward Jones, a prominent writer at the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, and president of the PTA, lost his two-decades-long job. He was forced to take whatever work he could just to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads. These hardscrabble years prepared his young daughter’s soul to seek a joy beyond glittering theatrical lights.

Now, though, she was just dreaming of how to make it in show biz.

As a 16-year-old blossoming beauty, she aspired to dance and sing at the “Muny Opera” in St. Louis, and auditioned for a part, but was rejected.  So, she spiffed up her act and, a year later, in the summer of 1937, gave it another shot — this time tapped to perform with the municipal opera in its grand 10,000-seat amphitheater.

She was on her way. After graduating from high school with honors, with her parents’ approval, she joined a traveling vaudeville troupe — christened “Virginia Mayo.”

While performing in New York, her act was booked at Billy Rose’s “Diamond Horseshoe.” “We’d definitely arrived,” she said of the venue where a talent scout spotted her in 1942. Soon Sam Goldwyn was signing her as one of his “Goldwyn Girls” — a role in which she danced and sang in numerous comedies and musicals. Fortuitously, she stuck it out, and Goldwyn eventually rolled the dice. Believing she was more than just another pretty face, he gave her a small part in Jack London (1943), putting her in the path of future husband Michael O’Shea, a Catholic.

Goldwyn’s hunch was right. She was the consummate actress. "I just put my head down and did the work. All I ever wanted in my life was to do the work,” she said. So she did — the following year, playing Princess Margaret in The Princess and the Pirate (1944), co-starring Bob Hope, and a year later, Ellen Shaveley in Wonder Man (1945). 

Her hard work paid off. After making The Kid from Brooklyn (1946) with Danny Kaye, she got her big break in Goldwyn’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) in which she was cast as the unfaithful wife of returning veteran Dana Andrews. Next up: Rosalind van Hoorn, object of Mitty’s dreams, in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1946) as well as her real-life role as wife of O’Shea, whom she wed in 1947.

But it was her role in White Heat (1949), playing opposite James Cagney, as Verna, the conniving, deceitful wife of psychologically confused killer Cody Jarrett (Cagney), that garnered her the best reviews of her career.

She would continue acting in the 1950s even as she gave birth to daughter Mary Catherine and her career began slowing down.

What was not slowing down was her quest for joy — Hollywood only providing a short-lived imitation. “I was searching in my soul for a spirituality, a religion I could embrace and practice,” she said. By 1952, Time Magazine reported in its cover story, “Bishop Fulton Sheen: The First ‘Televangelist’” (4/14/1952), that, among other prominent individuals, he was “giving instruction” to “Screen Star Virginia Mayo.”

Virginia was so “incredibly moved by his words and his voice” on one of his weekly shows, she said, that, when she and Michael were in New York, they made a point of seeking him out. A meeting was granted and their lives were changed.

“The Bishop was wonderful to us, so gentle,” she said of this man of the cloth. “What a sweet, nice man … Just brilliant,” she said of his “way of seeing things so incredibly clearly …” and his ability to “articulate things about faith and God, religion and spirituality I never could … How gentle. How intelligent he was.”

At her request, he gave her reams of spiritually-rich literature. “I yearned for something special … a religion … that would give me joy and satisfaction.”  And, she said, “I began to relax. I’d finally found the Church I’d been searching for all my life.”

She formally converted to Catholicism in 1974 after the tragic death of her husband — foul play, she suspected. A timely conversion to help heal the wounds and see her destiny was so much greater than ephemeral theatrical gold.  “The Church,” she said, “has given me such peace and comfort.”