The Good and the Badham

​Mary Badham is not a name most moviegoers recognize – even many who have seen and adore To Kill a Mockingbird.  But she was the 10-year-old girl who played ‘Scout’ and got a supporting actress Oscar nomination for it.
 
She actually had a bit of a career as a young actress after making the movie in 1962 – including This Property Was Condemned with Robert Redford and Natalie Wood, and even was in the last-ever episode of The Twilight Zone.  But acting was never her driving interest, and she’s been largely retired for 56 years, other than a small cameo role in a small, reasonably-charming independent movie Our Very Own in 2005 (which I’ve seen) after the filmmakers actively pursued her, and (to my surprise) a TV movie thriller, Erasing His Past in 2019.  But that’s it.  And she’s never done theater. 
 
Until now.
 
And is it ever a theatrical debut.
 
Opening just the other day, she’s now appearing at the Kennedy Center in Aaron Sorkin’s stage adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird.  As the expression goes – boy, howdy.  That’s a stage debut.
 
Sorkin’s play opened on Broadway in late 2018 with Jeff Daniels starring as ‘Atticus Finch.’  It was a big success but had to shut down because of COVID, though he returned to the role when the play re-opened on Broadway.  It also started a national tour with Richard Thomas in the lead.
 
Badham had seen the play on Broadway and loved it, but had no thought of actually being in it.  However, the producer went all-out to get her involved.  And finally she agreed,  She’ll be playing the role of ‘Mrs. Dubose,’ who is the Finch family’s strong-willed, racist neighbor.

It’s not a major role, but an important one, most especially because of the character’s interactions with an often-confrontational ‘Scout.’  A Washington Post article on the production describes how “mind-bending” it is for actress Melanie Moore who plays ‘Scout’ in the play and shares scenes with Ms. Badham who originated the role 54 years earlier.  (Unlike the 10-years-old that Badham was in the film, Moore plays the character over a range of ages and is 30.)
 
“In rehearsals, I would do things and make her laugh,” Moore says, “and she would come up to me and say, ‘Oh, that was so Scout when you did that.’  Moments like that brought me so much joy. I felt like I was really bringing something to the character that she felt like she recognized and also surprised her. But I can’t think too hard about yelling things at the original movie Scout as Scout myself.”

If you don’t remember the character of ‘Mrs. Dubose’ well, here’s a scene from the movie --

I haven’t seen any reviews yet of the production at the Kennedy Center, though have come across a couple of articles about her being in the show.  This one here in the Washington Post is a pretty good, detailed one.  
 
There’s also a long podcast interview with her by the entertainment reporter for local Washington, D.C. station, WTOP which I’ll link to below.  But this is a brief, 40-second preview that’s highly-worth checking out because of a moment at the very end which will melt the hearts of fans of the movie.  Presuming you have a heart

One of the things that stands out in her WTOP interview were her glowing words about Gregory Peck, who played her noble father ‘Atticus Finch’ in the film – but also of Brock Peters, who played ‘Tom Robinson,’ the man her father was defending. 
 
“What you saw on screen is what we got at home,” Badham said. “I would go home with the Pecks on the weekend. We became very close and stayed friends right up until he passed. He was an Atticus. He really was. He was so kind, generous, intelligent, well-read and just a very good role model for me because I lost my parents very early in my life.”
 
In fact, since Badham lost her parents young, Peck became almost a real-life father figure to her.
 
“My mother died three weeks after I graduated high school and Daddy died two years after I got married,” Badham said. “He [Peck] would take the time to pick up the phone and call: ‘How are you doing, kiddo?’ … Whenever I was in Los Angeles, I’d go to their house. It was a very close relationship. He and Bernice picked up where Mother and Daddy left off.”
 
It turns out, too, that she stayed in touch with Brock Peters over the years and was sort of mentored by him.
 
“Brock and I did a symphony program together … in Kansas where they played some pieces of music [from the movie], then between the music we would tell little behind-the-scenes stories … things that happened off-camera,” Badham said. “I had my daddy, I had Gregory Peck and I had Brock Peters. Those three guys were my male role models.”
 
By the way, if one does know the name “Badham” in relation to movies, it’s more likely her older brother, John Badham.  He became a director and a very successful one, making such movies as Saturday Night Fever, WarGames, and Blue Thunder.  In fact, he’s still directing, mostly TV these days.  She tells a funny story on the podcast about his reacting to her making To Kill a Mockingbird.
 
“All he ever wanted to do was be in film and theater, that was his goal, he studied at Yale, working hard, beating his brains out to make it,” she said. “He gets a call from my mother, ‘Baby sister is going to be in a movie.’ He’s like, ‘What?’ Fast forward, ‘Baby sister has been nominated for an Academy Award,’ and I don’t think he’s ever forgiven me!”
 
As a bit of a sidenote, I was intrigued for an odd personal reason by Mary Badham talking on the podcast about the film’s famous Halloween ham costume. 
 
“It was made out of chicken wire and paper machete,” she said. “Our set manager made it [and] wanted to try it on me to make sure it would fit OK. When he did, it went right down and I couldn’t see out of the eye port, so he had to rig up a harness in there. It was so wide, it was a little difficult to maneuver around in it very easily, but we managed.”

Why this stood out for me is that many years ago, I was a tourguide at Universal Studios.  And on Halloween, the tourguides were all encouraged to wear costumes.  Now, one of the tour controllers, who sent out guides when a tram was ready, was a young woman named Spanky, and everyone there knew that her very favorite movie in the entire world was To Kill a Mockingbird, which was a Universal movie.  (We guides would always point out the Boo Radley house when the tram passed by – Boo Radley played by a young Robert Duvall).  And as it happened and fate intervened, Spanky herself was very small, less than five-feet.  So, what several tourguides did was go to the studio’s massive property warehouse where props from Universal movies over the decades were still stored.  And they asked if by any remote chance the warehouse still had the ham costume??  And…it did!  The guides explained why they wanted to borrow it for a few hours – and the warehouse manager had a heart and love of movies, and actually gave permission.  So, they sneaked the ham costume up to the tour center, and in a joyous ceremony presented it to Spanky to wear on Halloween.  She not only was overcome with bowled-over emotion – but even better, she fit in it!  And for the rest of the day, this overjoyed young woman went around for Halloween wearing Scout’s real ham costume.
 
But this is all about Mary Badham, who wore the ham costume for the first time when she was 10 years old.  And is now making her stage debut at age 69 in the stage version of To Kill a Mockingbird at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.  What a stage debut. 
 
No word yet if she’ll continue on the national tour with the show.  But if she is when it comes to Los Angeles in October, I will do everything I can to make the show my second to attend during the pandemic.
 
Here's the full podcast interview with her for Jason Fraley of WTOP.