Spring Byington

Spring Byington was an American actress known for You Can't Take It with You (1938, Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress), Little Women (1933), as the beloved Marmee, and December Bride (1954), in which she starred as a widowed woman resisting pressure to remarry, following decades as a contract player at MGM in films including Jezebel (1938), Meet John Doe (1941), and Heaven Can Wait (1943). She was in a long-term relationship with actress Marjorie Main -- the two were inseparable for decades, worked together, and traveled together, and when asked directly about it, Main once remarked, "It's true, she didn't have much use for men." Biographers, most notably Main's biographer Michelle Vogel, have documented the relationship as romantic. Like all women of her era in Hollywood, Byington never publicly addressed her identity, but her story has become part of the documented history of lesbian life in golden-age Hollywood.