Marjorie Main

Marjorie Main was an American character actress, born Mary Tomlinson, best known for playing Ma Kettle in nine Ma and Pa Kettle films (1949) alongside a long career as an MGM contract player in classics including Dead End (1937), The Women (1939), and Meet Me in St. Louis (1944). She earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for The Egg and I (1947), the film that introduced the Ma Kettle character. Main was married to Dr. Stanley LeFevre Krebs from 1921 until his death in 1935, but for decades she was also in a close, constant companionship with actress Spring Byington -- the two were inseparable, worked together, and traveled together, leading Main's biographer Michelle Vogel to document the relationship as romantic. Main herself once remarked of Byington, "It's true, she didn't have much use for men." Like most women of her era in Hollywood, Main never publicly addressed her own identity, but her decades-long bond with Byington has become part of the documented history of lesbian life in golden-age Hollywood.