Virginia Dwyer Gorman

In October of 1991, retired soap actress, Virginia Dwyer Gorman, along with her sister, Jenny Lou Brink, sought to donate the Woodward painting, Contentment to the Springfield Museum of Fine Arts. Virginia received a letter accepting her gift by the Acquisitions Committee on December 2, 1991, and was invited to an exhibition of newly gifted artwork to the museum being held the following weekend. She did not attend the exhibit.

We do not know how Virginia and her sister came to co-own the painting. (SEE ADDENDUM BELOW) According to Woodward's diary comments the painting was, "Exhibited very largely about the country. Sold, March 1942, by Harold Grieve of Hollywood for me, to a high executive of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures of Culver City, California, Mr. Bernard H. Hyman." Virginia herself was in entertainment as well, however, she was primarily in radio and television and located in New York City (most soaps, even to this day are shot in NYC). We only learned of Virginia having owned the painting when documents relating to the gift were found in the Springfield Museum's records folder on Woodward. You can view the entire collection of papers by CLICKING HERE

Virginia Dwyer was born on December 19, 1919, in Omaha, Nebraska. She attended the University of Nebraska and UCLA. She started in radio, "I was doing very well as a radio actress when the 10-inch tube arrived on the scene, " Dwyer recalled in a 1969 New York Times interview, "But I went over to New York's Channel 5, then known as WABD Dumont, and volunteered to work in live drama for little more than the experience. The lights were so hot, my make-up melted on my leading man's clothes, but I was a television actress, and I've been at it ever since."

Dwyer was an actress best known for her work on daytime soap operas. Her roles included Mary Matthews in ANOTHER WORLD, Janice Turner in AS THE WORLD TURNS, Janice Turner Hughes, Ruth Jennings Holden in THE GUIDING LIGHT, Tracey Malone in YOUNG DOCTOR MALONE, Jane Edwards Ames in THE SECRET STORM, and Jocelyn Brent of in THE ROAD OF LIFE. She was best known for her role as matriarch Mary Matthews on Another World, a role she played from the series premiere in 1964 until her departure in 1975. Although popular with the audience, she fell into disfavor with head writer Harding Lemay, reportedly because she refused to learn her dialogue as written. Finally, Lemay had the Mary Matthews character die unexpectedly off-camera, thus eliminating Dwyer from the program. After being a regular performer on daytime television for over 20 years, Dwyer did not work on daytime again after leaving Another World.

Dwyer was married three times, in 1941, she married Emmy-award winning television producer James Fleming, a pioneer in television news who helped start the "Today" show on NBC. She later married television director Walter Gorman whom she survived after his death in 1972. She then married to Osgood Caruthers, who served as a bureau chief for The Associated Press, The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times during a 25-year career as a foreign correspondent. Dwyer survived Caruthers as well when he passed in 1985. She did not marry again and it is unclear to us why she still used the name of her second husband, Gorman, in the latter portion of her life. All of her correspondence with the administrators of the museum have her name recorded as Virginia Gorman. Virginia died August 20, 2012, at the age of 92, 20 years after her contribution to the museum. Her sister Jenny would pass three and a half years later. Below is her obituary published in the Westport (CT) News.

ADDENDUM: New information regarding the provenance of Contentment

In August of 2018, a Westport, CT man who watched an old movie (Saratoga) on Turner Movie Classics (TMC) and noted the producer (Hyman), believes that Hyman may be related to some childhood friends he once knew and turned to Google to search for information on Bernard H. Hyman. He finds our website and emails us to related what he knows about the Hymans. We, here at the website, take notice immediately to his location, Westport, CT, and our interest is piqued knowing that Dwyer's sister Jenny lived there as well. Needless to say, we have yet to find confirmation connecting the names of the Hymam Family members he knew (some of which worked as studio executives as well) to Bernard himself. The records are suprisingly sparce but we find that what we do know is compelling enough to speculate that that painting came east with Bernard's son after the death of his mother (Lula). Bernard's son had three sons of his own, two of which worked in the entertainment industry, and could very well have crossed paths with a famous soap actress or her sister who lived in the same town. Oddly enough and purely incidential to this story, not only was Saratoga one of Hyman's last films before getting sick, it starred Clark Gable whom Hyman would later be interred next to at the famous Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California. (Source: http://www.findagrave.com/)