Margaret Lindsay: A Recovered Treasure

Behind the Scenes

I was inspired to write this article on Margaret Lindsay while researching to develop a single-actor focused unit for an upcoming college film studies course that I will teach. Her performances captivated me, and I am keen to guide others to her work, whether you’re a fellow film lover or also a teacher who gets to work with the next generations of film fans and makers.

For the subject of this unit, I first wanted to select an excellent performer who is not widely known, especially to younger generations. The second factor was that the actor’s filmography includes multiple sophisticated female roles that invite deft gender analysis. Students today arrive at college prepared to categorise female characters as soft or fierce, tradwife or badass. To equip them for more nuanced analysis beyond social media discourse, I wanted an actor with a set of complex roles. Third, the films would be from 1930s-1950s Hollywood and draw in contemporary viewers so that they will seek out more films from that era on their own. Over the past decade, I’ve experienced students increasingly asking for help to expand their watchlists–to untether themselves from the watch-next algorithms that narrow the range of films they encounter. My fourth and final criterion for this new unit was a local connection with the actor or her films. I teach in Iowa, and there’s only so much we can do with John Wayne and Field of Dreams (Phil Alden Robinson, 1989). As a related note, I have met many fellow David Lynch fans and scholars who cannot identify Iowa as the state where The Straight Story (1999) was set and shot.

These four criteria brought me to Margaret Lindsay. She appeared in more than 80 films from 1932 to 1974. In her supporting and starring roles, she shared the silver screen with golden-age Hollywood notables like Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Bette Davis, Marlene Dietrich, Vincent Price, Edward G. Robinson, fellow Iowan John Wayne, and Anna May Wong among many others. Lindsay wasn’t just sharing screen space. She created dynamic energy with these more widely remembered actors that resulted in some of the most iconic scenes in the films. Lindsay did rise to national fame in the early 1940s through her seven-picture run as Nikki Porter in the Ellery Queen films as well as several bigger pictures early in that decade. While her fame has faded, Lindsay is still appreciated today by cineastes familiar with 1930s-50s Hollywood cinema. Quentin Tarantino spoke enthusiastically about her work in Episode 209: “The Spoilers Special” of the Video Archives podcast, produced by Gala Avary, and her films have been screened within the last year at his Vista Theater in Hollywood. Furthermore, Lindsay lived her life as a somewhat-public queer woman in Hollywood during decades when this was all but unimaginable. Her brilliant performances warrant watching and rewatching, and her story of personal persistence is compelling and inspiring. Iowans then and now have a can-do hard-work reputation, and perhaps that upbringing context bolstered Lindsay’s career and life internally and externally.

Biographical Notes

The actor began her life in Dubuque, Iowa, born on 19 September 1910 to Bertha and John Kies. Her entire childhood was rooted in this Iowa city located on the banks of the Mississippi River until she graduated from Academy of The Visitation high school in Dubuque. After high school, she enrolled in a seminary school in Washington, D.C. but decided that her path was in acting. With the support of her family, Margaret Kies moved to New York City to enrol in the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. In New York, the actor worked diligently to break into theatre with an eye towards moving pictures. While speaking with an Iowa/Midwest accent has been advantageous to journalists aspiring to national broadcasting (think Tom Brokaw), dramatic actors have a greater need to become speech chameleons, to sound – and of course act – like they hail from different places. One of the most fascinating examples of this flexibility is the metamorphosis of Margaret Kies into Margaret Lindsay.

According to Harrison Lewis, the director of the Harrison Lewis Screen and Stage School in 1930s New York, he came up with the clever idea of sending young Margaret Kies to England to gain professional experience and to return to the US with a new name and a claim (not accurate yet highly effective) that she was British.¹ In the early 1930s, work in many trades was hard to come by in the US, including acting. However, Hollywood studios were producing films that demanded British actors, and the domestic supply was short. In that context, Kies travelled to Britain, landed theatre roles, and then returned to New York with her new name, which she reportedly selected from a list of recommendations by Lewis.²

Lindsay with G Men costar James Cagney, 1935, Warner Bros.

Margaret Lindsay appeared for casting calls, and her British accent and mannerisms were polished so convincingly that she launched her silver screen career with British characters like Edith Harris in the award-winning Cavalcade (Frank Lloyd, 1933). To be sure, this false identity is problematic, yet the intelligence and ingenuity required to pull it off are formidable. Relatedly, while Lewis claimed full credit for the career-changing concept, his account has about it the whiff of a man aiming to profit via a woman’s labours and talents, as well as an American public that generally would not question Lewis’s gendered logic.

The vast majority of Lindsay’s sizable filmography is in the 1930s-40s. Her last feature film role was a supporting part in Harry Keller’s 1963 Sandra Dee and Peter Fonda comedy, Tammy and the Doctor. Her final screen role was a supporting part in the 1974 television movie starring Fred MacMurray, The Chadwick Family. Between her first and last films, Lindsay was known as a hard-working Iowa/Midwest actor, a woman who returned promptly to the set twice after separate significant injuries – a dislocated jaw and a broken ankle. Lindsay had a longtime partner, Mary McCarty, though the narrative of her life that studios – and newspapers in collusion with them – fabricated was a long list of heterosexual relationships with male Hollywood actors and agents. According to the 11 May 1981 issue of The Telegraph Herald, Lindsay died of emphysema at age 70 in Los Angeles. She is buried in Culver City, California.

Lindsay with Jezebel costars Bette Davis & Henry Fonda, 1938, Warner Bros.

The Ellery Queen Mysteries, 1940-1942

From the many angles to approach Margaret Lindsay as a great actor, I am choosing the seven Ellery Queen films in which she co-starred chiefly with Ralph Bellamy (briefly with William Gargan) between 1940 and 1942. This popular series made Lindsay synonymous with her character Nikki Porter, an aspiring crime writer who crosses paths in the first instalment with Ellery Queen, an already-successful crime writer who privately tries to solve the cases of his police-inspector father to inspire his next books. That first film ends with Nikki taking the job of Ellery’s secretary, though it’s clear to the audience that she sees this as a chance to advance her own writing career. Subsequent films follow Ellery and Nikki as they investigate crime scenes, deploy disguises and deception, and get into scrapes that are equal parts hilarious and perilous, all before solving the mystery at hand. As time capsules, these films’ fascinating plots still speak to us today, from a wellness-industry scam and scandal in Ellery Queen, Master Detective (Kurt Neumann, 1940) to the Sino-US geopolitics in Ellery Queen’s Penthouse Mystery (James P. Hogan, 1941) and Nazis inside the US in Enemy Agents Meet Ellery Queen (James P. Hogan, 1942). Lindsay and Bellamy make this crime sleuthing/writing duo magic on screen as they blend good-natured ribbing, quick-witted banter, and rigorous collaborative detection. Their mutual pleasure in each other’s company is so authentic that it feels like the actors Lindsay and Bellamy had a ball delivering their dialogue and action together on set.

Lindsay set Nikki Porter apart from other female characters in crime and comedy films of the era. She brought a unique character depth and warmth to the performance of fast-talking banter and ambition. Lindsay had outstanding speaking speed and interactive timing, but what she really added to these was a character whose personality was beyond merely sweet or cynical or calculating. She crafted Nikki as a professional woman who observes and analyses everyone around her and who is invested in forging meaningful relationships with people who she finds engaging and admirable. Other actors and films of the 1940s often play fast-talking females as superficial or emotionally detached. While the screenwriting deserves some credit for Nikki Porter’s uniqueness, it was really Margaret Lindsay who transcended genre types and clichés in fashioning the chemistry Nikki had with others and what that implied about her own interiority.

The genre innovations that Lindsay embodied in Nikki Porter were revolutionary in their era, and they are poignant in the context of women detectives in crime fiction today, particularly crime comedies. Akin to the Ellery Queen film series, which had approximately hourlong instalments, Poker Face (2023-present) and The Residence (2025) are successful cinematic streaming series that feature witty, fast-talking women who are highly effective at investigation and analytical extrapolation. Nikki Porter plays a vital role in this character lineage whose current progeny include Charlie Cale (Natasha Lyonne) and Cordelia Cupp (Uzo Aduba). Intelligent, focused, funny, capable of collaboration, and bringing their own style vibes, these modern crime comedy women follow in the footsteps of Lindsay’s Nikki Porter. We can appreciate and analyse these characters more fully with a historical perspective that recognises the groundbreaking talent Lindsay brought to the role in a different context of gender and intersectional equity and justice.

Ellery Queen’s Penthouse Mystery, lobby card, 1941.

The Nikki Porter role also honed Lindsay’s fashion capacities on the big screen. Lindsay enjoyed an iconic status at the time for the A-line skirts and stylish hats that she wore as Nikki. Yet Lindsay was neither a mere clothes horse nor a sexualised object. Nikki is always on the go, ever in the fray, and the storylines do not route her into longing for dates or a husband. Instead, the natural composure that Lindsay manufactured as Nikki walks, crouches, ducks into a shadow or behind a curtain, and reacts to physical threats demonstrates her astonishing abilities to look how she wants while being totally effective at solving crimes. She deserves a screwball crime comedy accolade equivalent of the old saying about Ginger Rogers; in this case, Nikki Porter does everything that Ellery Queen does, but in high heels, a restrictive A-line skirt, and hats that must remain jauntily in place. 

A top example of her wardrobe wonders appears in Ellery Queen’s Penthouse Mystery, though it is set up by a gender-tweaking comedy sequence that does not focus on her clothing. In this preliminary bit, Ellery is increasingly frustrated by Nikki falling behind on her secretarial work for him, and the situation comes to a head when he discovers that a stack of typed sheets on her desk are not his work but her own story-in-progress tied to their current investigation entitled “In the Mandarin’s Net.” Nikki responds to his criticism of her with a serious look and a forceful voice, “Did you think I’d give up my career just because I’m your secretary?” The silence of a stunned Ellery trying to generate a good retort is broken when the office phone rings and he, instead of his secretary, answers it. The call is for Nikki. He hands the phone to her, inverting the power structure of the office. Lindsay and Bellamy both pull faces that capture the gender reversal perfectly, with her exuding good-natured satisfaction and him conceding her rights and abilities as a partner in crime solving and writing. Lindsay plays Nikki as assertive without hostility, winning over Ellery and the audience in the process.

Without this sequence, the subsequent fashion battle and veritable runway showdown would feel like a shoehorned plot point with the sole purpose of putting Margaret Lindsay and Anna May Wong on screen together in fabulous outfits. Following the office gender inversion with Ellery, Nikki goes to the penthouse crime scene on her own to look for clues. The camera observes her movements through a balcony window, after which it becomes clear that what seemed an objective point of view is actually subjective. It’s Anna May Wong as Lois Ling, who is also trying to solve the case in order to recover a trove of jewels transported by the murder victim into the US from China to sell and thus finance Chinese efforts to defend against Japan. Lois suspects Nikki of the murder/theft, so she tries to apprehend her, and a tussle ensues between the glamorous two. The director, James P. Hogan, combines a series of closeups with medium and longer shots to highlight their fierce faces, the opposition of Nikki’s feminine fedora and Lois’s blunt-cut bangs, and the equal challenge of an assumedly life-or-death struggle when wearing an A-line skirt and a cheongsam respectively. Quite frankly, Lindsay pulls off fab outfits and millinery miracles that would look downright silly on almost any other actor, and all within a role that was always physically active.

To button up this Ellery Queen section, Lindsay got an elevated chance to shine as a resourceful and witty crime solver in the 1942 film, A Tragedy at Midnight (Joseph Santley). This comedy paired Lindsay with John Howard, who had risen to fame as Bulldog Drummond through a film series across the 1930s in parallel to Lindsay’s Nikki Porter across the 1940s. A Tragedy at Midnight gave both actors a chewier script, significantly higher production values, and a bump from protagonist crime writer to crime radio show host. This film is a delight on its own terms, and it highlights Lindsay’s performance strengths that were visible and cultivated across her Nikki Porter pictures yet remained confined by the more modest screenwriting and budgeting.

Margaret Lindsay and Ralph Bellamy as Nikki Porter and Ellery Queen.

Life-Art Imitation, 1935

In a tragic twist, Margaret Lindsay played a real-life role in the investigation of a suspicious death in Los Angeles. On 16 December 1935, the deceased body of Thelma Todd – the famous actor known for her roles in the Marx Brothers’ Monkey Business (1931) and Horse Feathers (1932) as well as Laurel and Hardy comedies, among many other films – was found in her car inside of her garage. According to a Los Angeles Times article from 24 December 1935, Thelma Todd spent much of her last night alive as guest of honour at a party thrown by Ida Lupino at the swank Trocadero Cafe on the Sunset Strip. Lupino said that she invited Pat DiCicco, Todd’s former husband, to join the party after a conversation with him the week before in which he said he hoped to be included. Then, on the evening of the party, the chair reserved for DiCicco remained empty, but not because he did not come to the Trocadero that night. He came, accompanied by Margaret Lindsay, and they sat at their own table elsewhere in the nightclub.

The newspaper article describes Lindsay’s appearance before the grand jury concerning the case: “Smartly clad in a dark tailored suit, with a silver fox slung across her shoulders and a chic blue hat on her brunette locks, Miss Lindsay fidgeted nervously as she entered the grand jury room where she remained half an hour.” Poignantly, Lindsay denied being engaged to DiCicco during her testimony. As a queer woman in Hollywood during the 1930s, Lindsay faced the formidable task of living her authentic love life while the studios and newspapers colluded in representing her as almost hyper-heterosexual. In this instance, her true identity could help minimise her association with DiCicco and the suspicion being cast his way, yet she needed to tread carefully with the public persona the industry had constructed for her. Ultimately, Todd’s death was ruled accidental, though speculations ranging from foul play to suicide lingered. The description of an anxious Lindsay underscores the real-life pressures she confronted across her acting career and throws into sharp relief the confident and empowered characters she played when the crimes were film fiction.

The Spoilers, 1942

After a thorough tour through Lindsay’s filmography, I consider The Spoilers (Ray Enright, 1942) to be the pinnacle of her dramatic performances. Just as her final turn as Nikki Porter was playing in cinemas, Margaret Lindsay was simultaneously demonstrating her impressive range that diverged strongly from her crime comedy role.

For anyone unfamiliar with The Spoilers, this 1942 version was the fourth of five adaptations of Rex Beach’s best-selling 1906 novel of the same name about the Alaska gold rush. Top billing in the picture went to Marlene Dietrich, Randolph Scott, and John Wayne. Dietrich plays Cherry Malotte, the proprietor of the Northern saloon and grubstaker of gold prospectors. Wayne plays Roy Glennister, co-owner of the prosperous Midas gold mine. Scott plays Alex McNamara, the gold commissioner. Glennister and Malotte have a long-standing relationship, but that seems shaky when the narrative starts with Glennister returning from a Seattle trip accompanied by the lovely, educated, and proper Helen Chester, played brilliantly by Margaret Lindsay. Romantic jostling ensues, as do deadly clashes when Chester’s uncle, a circuit court judge, and McNamara conspire to use legal loopholes to jump gold claims in the name of bringing law and order to this frontier. Without fully spoiling The Spoilers, the plot does include a full-force fist fight between Glennister and McNamara, with the pair of massive brutes that are Wayne and Scott creating a scene to rival Roddy Piper and Keith David’s rumble in John Carpenter’s They Live (1988), but without the irony or political insinuations.

Lindsay with fellow Iowan John Wayne in The Spoilers, 1942, Universal.

Although Lindsay did not get top billing, she has the most difficult performance to deliver. The lead actors all play familiar Western archetypes. Their characters don’t develop so much as confront new situations. But Lindsay’s Helen Chester circulates among her peers as a perpetual enigma. In this version of The Spoilers, the audience is kept guessing about Helen. Is she scheming to steal Glennister from Cherry? If so, what is she willing to do to win him from her apparent rival? Simultaneously, we wonder just how implicated she is with her uncle and McNamara’s scheme to steal gold mines. Does she know? If she knows, does she also have ethical lines that she will not cross with them? Even more dastardly, is Helen manipulating Glennister and Cherry to distract them from the scheme?

Lindsay’s performance as Helen is nothing short of amazing, particularly in this film era and genre. It’s a rare Western that has a supporting female role with such fundamental ambiguity. Lindsay conjures Helen as “Schrödinger’s lady” through skilled vocal modulations and especially through her gaze, which she coordinates with blinks to shift subtly and thereby seed audience suspicions as we watch what she is watching while the other characters remain oblivious. What’s more, Lindsay had to flex this uncertainty for the audience in scenes between herself and Wayne, herself and Dietrich and Wayne, herself and Scott, herself and Scott and Wayne, and herself and Scott and Wayne and Dietrich. Not only does Lindsay match the performances of her A-list co-stars, but she manages to create the compelling and unique figure that sets The Spoilers apart from more conventional Westerns.

Public Personae

As I mentioned earlier, Lindsay navigated her entire Hollywood career as a queer woman in a time and industry that were deeply homophobic. The studios went to great lengths with public relations efforts to present their actors as moral models who fit neatly and completely into particular social conventions of the day. Lindsay had little to no choice but to let the PR departments create the public persona for her that they felt was safe and would sell. The columns of the Los Angeles Times as well as her hometown Dubuque newspaper, The Telegraph Herald, covered her – in a double register of the word – obsessively as a heterosexual woman. In other respects, however, Lindsay lived her queer identity publicly, attending Hollywood and other events with her longtime partner, Mary McCarty – a fellow actor, most known for her roles in The French Line (Lloyd Bacon, 1953) and Babes in Toyland (Jack Donohue, 1961). On Lindsay’s sexual identity, the film scholar William J. Mann argued that she posed as heterosexual in direct parallel to posing as British to break into the film industry, writing, “The analogy is too obvious to resist: she also pretended to be straight, and landed glamorous supporting parts in a string of Warner Bros. films.”³ While a parallel exists, it is absolutely vital to distinguish the different levels of agency she had in creating and maintaining these facades, and especially what was at stake. Being unmasked as American instead of British would raise some ethical questions, though she was not taking work away from actors since she was motivated by the open niche demand by Hollywood. Being fully publicly queer, however, would most likely have ended her career and reputation, and it could readily have precipitated verbal and physical assault. 

In this section of the article, I present selected gestures in newspapers to heteronormalise Lindsay to show the relentless struggle she was forced to navigate in Hollywood, which underscores her greatness as an actor who largely succeeded while not capitulating to the hostile forces aimed at destroying what love meant in her life.

A bluntly direct example of how the Los Angeles Times helped frame Lindsay is the “Around and About in Hollywood” article by Read Kendall in the 6 January 1939 issue, which opens with the following three sentences:

To all appearances the type of girl men seem to want to marry is Margaret Lindsay. One out of every three letters she receives from masculine fans is a love missive. Approximately one out of every eight is an outright marriage proposal.

Kendall’s article reads like the male gaze built into the fabric of Hollywood cinema needed assistance concerning Lindsay. In case the cinematography and editing weren’t sufficiently delivering her as an object of heterosexual “masculine” desire, to use the article’s own term, the newspaper further assures readers that Margaret Lindsay was pure wife material. The statistics are an intriguing turn to data as evidence with which to protest this assertion. It’s revealing that such data exists, at least purportedly–that the studios implicitly deemed it significant to codify and calculate the heterosexual energies generated by Lindsay’s screen appearances. Before the column is done, Kendall adds, “If the present ratio, especially from Latin countries, continues the love letter and marriage proposal portions may climb to two out of three and three out of eight respectively.” The added ethnic/national dimension trades in stereotypes to convey that foreign Latin men of machismo adore Lindsay, and so white American men must also.

In a different article by Read Kendall, printed in the 9 March 1936 issue of the Los Angeles Times we find a core ideological inconsistency. Kendall writes, “It wouldn’t surprise anybody if Margaret Lindsay and Pat DeCicco, the agent, were among the first couples to get married in the near future. They hide behind Hollywood’s bromidic statement, ‘we’re only good friends.’ But those close to them say that the romance has reached the serious stage and that an elopement is in order.” The timing and pairing with DeCicco connects back to Lindsay’s grand jury appearance related to Thelma Todd’s death. The ideological inconsistency revealed by this column is Kendall’s allusion to the Hollywood bromide of claiming friendship instead of romance. The industry that consistently portrayed queer women as platonic friends in order to disguise and hide their actual romance inverts precisely this logic here by claiming that Lindsay and DeCicco’s public platonic friendship is a ruse they use to keep their true romance private. Read critically, these articles, and there are many, unconsciously expose the homophobic anxieties that surely made Lindsay’s life and career much harder than those of fellow actors unburdened by structures of hate and oppression.

As a final note, Lindsay’s connection to Iowa made positive appearances in her public persona via newspapers. Articles in the Los Angeles Times and The Telegraph Herald of Dubuque document Lindsay’s vacation visits to her mother and sisters in Iowa as well as the visits of Iowan family and others who Lindsay hosted in Hollywood. While these articles were likely leveraging her Midwest roots to polish Lindsay’s moral representation in the public eye, they also attest to an actor who stayed close with her family and childhood community even as her Hollywood career rose to impressive fame and productivity. An article in the 16 December 1934 issue of The Telegraph Herald and Times Journal, for example, recounts both the public appearances she made to socialise with Dubuque folks and activities she did just with sisters and her mother. Lindsay’s Iowa-linked generosity also features in a three-quarters-page spread of the 12 September 1937 issue of the Des Moines Sunday Register, penned by Ronald “Dutch” Reagan. At that time, Reagan was making the move from Des Moines sports journalist to Hollywood actor, and the piece details the highlights of Lindsay taking Reagan on a guided tour to several favourite Los Angeles spots as she welcomed him into the acting community. Five fun photos accompany Reagan’s writing, which is equal parts thankful praise of Lindsay as actor/host and stunning surprise at all the Mexican architecture, food, and culture in several of Lindsay’s chosen destinations. What comes through is Margaret Lindsay’s warmth, charm, and professionalism within industry and national contexts dominated by people who could not accept a queer woman or imagine culture and history beyond white America. Margaret Lindsay’s films remain – and they remain beautiful, entertaining, moving, and groundbreaking for roles that continue to innovate how women shape the social imaginary.

One of the many promotional photos circulated to craft Lindsay’s public Hollywood persona.

Epilogue

I am keen to journey into Margaret Lindsay’s life, career, and films with students. Hopefully this article encourages others to check out her films and share them, informally or academically, so that she can continue with renewed vim and vigour to entertain and provoke cineastes and students.

Acknowledgement

Thank you to Michael May, Librarian at Carnegie-Stout Public Library in Dubuque, Iowa for recommending some productive research resources.

Works Cited

Books:

• Lewis, Harrison. Lewis’ Technique of Acting. New York: Steinway Hall, 1942.
• Mann, William J. Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910-1969. New York: Viking, 2001.

Films:

• Cavalcade. Directed by Frank Lloyd. Fox Film Corporation, 1933.
• Ellery Queen, Master Detective. Directed by Kurt Neumann. Columbia Pictures, 1940.
• Ellery Queen’s Penthouse Mystery. Directed by James P. Hogan. Columbia Pictures, 1941.
• Enemy Agents Meet Ellery Queen. Directed by James P. Hogan. Columbia Pictures, 1942.
• The House of Seven Gables. Directed by Joe May. Universal Pictures, 1940.
• The Spoilers. Directed by Ray Enright. Universal Pictures, 1942.
• A Tragedy at Midnight. Directed by Joseph Santley. Republic Pictures, 1942.

TV Series:

• Poker Face. Created by Rian Johnson. Animal Pictures, T-Street, et. al. 2023-2025.
• The Residence. Created by Paul William Davies. Sondaland. 2025.

Newspaper Articles:

• “Margaret Lindsay Settles Rumors, Admits She Is Not English But Is Margaret Kies of Dubuque.” The Telegraph-Herald and Times-Journal. 29 January 1933.
• “Last ‘Date’ Secret Told: Jury Learns of Vacant Chair Left for Di Cicco at Thelma Todd Party.” Los Angeles Times, 24 December 1935. 
• “Around and About in Hollywood: Off Screen Romance.” Los Angeles Times. By Kendall Read. 9 March 1936.
• “Pretty Margaret Lindsay, Iowa Screen Star, Shows ‘Dutch’ the Sights of Los Angeles.” Des Moines Sunday Register. By Ronald “Dutch” Reagan. 12 September 1937.
• “Around and About in Hollywood.” Los Angeles Times. By Kendall Read. 6 January 1939.
• “Screen Star Lindsay Never Forgot Dubuque.” The Telegraph Herald. By Elaine Johnson. 11 May 1981.

Podcast Episode:

• “The Spoilers Special.” Video Archives. Conversation between Quentin Tarantino, Roger Avary, and Gala Avary. Episode 209. Produced by Gala Avary. Original Air Date: 18 February 2025.

Endnotes