Reta Shaw
Reta Shaw is an actor, born 1912.
The credit list gives the game away before any biography does. Cook. Housekeeper. Nurse. Head nurse. Manager of a cafe. Reta Shaw spent three decades being hired to run somebody else's kitchen or ward, and she was hired that often because she was unusually good at it.
The type she perfected was the working woman who is not charmed by you. In Mary Poppins she is Mrs. Brill, the cook who treats a magical nanny as one more person making a mess of her downstairs. In Pollyanna she is Tillie Lagerlof; in Picnic, Irma Henderson, a small-town neighbour watching a stranger unsettle everybody; in The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, a woman named Mrs. Halcyon Maxwell, which is most of the joke before she opens her mouth. The performances share a flatness that is authority rather than laziness. She delivers a line as though the matter is already closed, and the scene has to go around her.
Television took most of her later work, and the housekeeper Martha Grant on The Ghost & Mrs. Muir is the role she is most remembered for. Around it sit guest slots on The Real McCoys, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, The Patty Duke Show, Alcoa Premiere and The New Dick Van Dyke Show, plus a second Disney feature in Escape to Witch Mountain. She died in 1982. Very few careers are this legible: an actor who found one exact register and was in demand for it for thirty years.
Movies (8)
TV (7)
Where to start with Reta Shaw
The obvious door is Mary Poppins, and it is still the right one. Mrs. Brill has maybe eight minutes of screen time and every one of them lands, because she plays the household staff as people with opinions about the household.
For the sustained version, go to The Ghost & Mrs. Muir, where the housekeeper role gave her weekly room to work. Then take the two Disney features, Pollyanna and Escape to Witch Mountain, which bracket her career and show the same instrument fifteen years apart.
If you want the good stuff, though, watch Picnic. It is the best film on this list by a distance, and her small-town woman is the sort of unshowy supporting work that holds an ensemble together. The Ghost and Mr. Chicken is the funniest use of her, and The Pajama Game the most energetic.