J. E. Smyth, FRHistS, is a historian, critic, and the author of Mary C. McCall Jr.: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood’s Most Powerful Screenwriter (2024) and several other books about Hollywood, women in film and media, and historical filmmaking. Her research focuses on US, British, and occasionally contemporary European cinema. She has interests in labour and theatre history on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as 19th and 20th-century women’s history.
Smyth studied History of Art at Wellesley College (B.A. summa cum laude) and did her postgraduate degrees at Yale University (M.A. History of Art, M.Phil. American Studies, Ph.D. Film Studies).
A leading historian of golden age Hollywood, she began by exploring historical filmmaking in the 1930s before moving on to adaptations of Edna Ferber’s historical novels, many of which focus on the lives of women. Smyth tends to write more about the work of actors, screenwriters, producers, and film editors, but in 2014, published Fred Zinnemann and the Cinema of Resistance (2014), the first in-depth exploration of the director’s personal papers. Rather than being a subjective director-based “auteur” study, the book is informed by production records, including letters, script and editing notes, sketches, and publicity. Using similar methods, Smyth also wrote Nobody’s Girl Friday, the first history of the many women who worked for the Hollywood studios from the late 1920s through the 1950s, a mammoth task supported by the British Academy. She subsequently edited and wrote a new introduction for Jane Allen’s classic Hollywood novel, I Lost My Girlish Laughter, and had the good fortune to work closely with the author’s daughter Ann Waswo, herself an academic. Smyth’s work on labour leader, Hollywood feminist, and screenwriter Mary C. McCall Jr. was supported by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. Smyth continues to be interested in how and why the many women who worked in film during the golden age of the Hollywood studios have been forgotten or ignored by academic historians and the media.
Over the years, her books have won several awards, including the Theatre Library Association’s Special Jury Prize (2019), the International Association of Media Historians’ Michael Nelson Prize (2009), and the Association of American Publishers Award (2010). In 2011-12, she was in Los Angeles as a Getty Research Institute scholar-in-residence. In 2015, she had the honour of working with producer Carolyn Pfeiffer on the award-winning PBS documentary, Children of Giant (2015). In 2021, she was named an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences film scholar for her project on Mary C. McCall Jr. The book would not have been possible without the cooperation of McCall’s daughters, network television writer Mary-David Sheiner and former Los Angeles Times film critic Sheila Benson.
More recently, she has written about actor Paul Scofield’s theatre career during the Cold War and two films directed by Alfred Hitchcock in the 1930s, The 39 Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938). Over the years, she has been lucky to work closely with many filmmakers, and has occasionally programmed film series and screenings with the input of the filmmakers and their families. She is also interested in the nuances and politics of film restoration, and has commented on these issues in some of her reviews.
Smyth contributes to The Times Literary Supplement and has written for The Los Angeles Review of Books, Cineaste, Sight & Sound, the Writers Guild of America’s Written By, and other outlets. Over the years, she has been a frequent guest on the BBC. Her work has been written about in The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Hollywood Reporter, The New York Post, The Observer, Newsweek, Jacobin, and other outlets. She lives in the Midlands.
J. E. Smyth 