Want to know the best Greer Garson movies? How about the worst Greer Garson movies? Curious about Greer Garson box office grosses or which Greer Garson movie picked up the most Oscar® nominations? Need to know which Greer Garson movie got the best reviews from critics and audiences? Well you have come to the right place….because we have all of that information.
Greer Garson (1904-1996) was an English Oscar® winning film actress. She was one of the most popular stars working in the 1940s…appearing in 9 $100 million (adjusted gross) movies during that time decade, Greer Garson’s IMDb page shows 41 acting credits from 1934-1982. This page will rank 25 Greer Garson movies from Best to Worst in six different sortable columns of information. Her television appearances and short films were not included in the rankings.
Drivel part of the page: This Greer Garson page was requested by Chris and Flora. Thanks to the MGM Ledgers we were able to not only secure all of Garson’s domestic box office totals….but also most of her worldwide box office totals. As we were researching this page, the start of Garson’s career reminded us of the start of current star, Jennifer Lawrence. Both started their careers off with lots of box office hits and lots of Oscar® nomination. It will interesting to see if Lawrence’s career follows the same path that Garson’s career took.
Greer Garson Movies Ranked In Chronological Order With Ultimate Movie Rankings Score (1 to 5 UMR Tickets) *Best combo of box office, reviews and awards.
Greer Garson Movies Can Be Ranked 6 Ways In This Table
The really cool thing about this table is that it is “user-sortable”. Rank the movies anyway you want.
- Sort Greer Garson movies by co-stars of her movies and by by Ultimate Movie Ranking (UMR) Score. UMR Score puts box office, reviews and awards into a mathematical equation and gives each movie a score.
- Sort Greer Garson movies by adjusted domestic box office grosses using current movie ticket cost (in millions)
- Sort Greer Garson movies by adjusted worldwide box office grosses using current movie ticket cost (in millions)
- Sort Greer Garson movies by how they were received by critics and audiences. 60% rating or higher should indicate a good movie.
- Sort by how many Oscar® nominations and how many Oscar® wins each Greer Garson movie received.
- Blue link in Co-star column takes you to that star’s UMR movie page
Stats and Possibly Interesting Things From The Above Greer Garson Table
- Thirteen Greer Garson movies crossed the magical $100 million domestic gross mark. That is a percentage of 52.00% of her movies listed. Mrs. Miniver (1942) was her biggest box office hit.
- An average Greer Garson movie grossed $156.30 million in adjusted box office gross.
- Using RottenTomatoes.com’s 60% fresh meter. 14 of Greer Garson’s movies are rated as good movies…or 56.00% of her movies. Random Harvest (1942) is her highest rated movie while Adventure (1945) is her lowest rated movie.
- Fifteen Greer Garson movies received at least one Oscar® nomination in any category…..or 60.00% of her movies.
- Five Greer Garson movies won at least one Oscar® in any category…..or 20.00% of her movies.
- An average Ultimate Movie Ranking (UMR) Score is 60.00. 22 Greer Garson movie scored higher that average….or 88.00% of her movies.Mrs. Miniver (1942) got the the highest UMR Score while The Law And The Lady (1951) got the lowest UMR Score.
Possibly Interesting Facts About Greer Garson
1. Eileen Evelyn Greer Garson was born in East Ham, Essex in 1904.
2. Greer Garson was tutored by Laurence Olivier during her theatre days in London.
3. Louis B. Mayer discovered Greer Garson while he was in London looking for new talent.
4. Talk about getting your career off to a good start: Garson received 6 Oscar® nominations during the first 7 years of her career.
5. Greer Garson holds the record with Bette Davis for most years in a row to receive an Oscar® nomination…..5 years in a row. Garson was nominated every year from 1941-1945. Davis did the same accomplishment 1938-1942.
6. Overall Greer Garson was nominated for 7 Oscars®. She won the Best Actress Oscar® for 1942’s Mrs. Miniver. Only twelve people received more acting nominations than her.
7. Greer Garson’s most famous movie is 1942’s Mrs. Miniver. Winston Churchill once said that Mrs. Miniver had done more for the war effort than a flotilla of destroyers.
8. Greer Garson was married three times. Her second marriage was to actor, Richard Ney. Ney and Garson co-starred in 1942’s Mrs. Miniver, they married after filming ended. Ney played her son in that movie. Greer had three step-children, adopted by her third husband, Buddy E.E. Fogelson, after his brother’s death.
9. Greer Garson played the wife of Walter Pidgeon a total of eight times; in 1941’s Blossoms in the Dust,1942’s Mrs. Miniver,1943’s Madame Curie, 1944’s Mrs. Parkington, 1948’s Julia Misbehaves , 1950’s The Miniver Story, 1949’s That Forsyte Woman and 1953’s Scandal at Scourie.
10. Greer Garsons’ cumulative movie totals: Adjusted domestic box office: $3.65 billion. Her movies received 62 Oscar® nominations….winning 10 times.
Check out Greer Garson‘s career compared to current and classic actors. Most 100 Million Dollar Movies of All-Time.
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For comments….all you need is a name and a comment….please ignore the rest.
I think I found an insight to my outrageously high ranking of Garson among my favorites and legends. sure she won a best actress Oscar. sure Bette Davis and Garson share the record for most consecutive best actress Oscar nominations , five . much more importantly, I met her when I was 20 and she 70. we met at a dallas,tx debutante party. my mother also recounted how she at age 20 had worn the same gown to a dallas debutant party as greer garson wore to that same party. I just re read these comments. hallowed ground where Bob joined the commenters in July 2016. and mr. mumbles was launched. great fun.
1 This post is almost a mini ‘anniversary’ one because it was in posts of 10 July 2016 on this site that you and I first exchanged comments and indeed you introduced to the site the character of “Mr Mumbles” now one of the site’s main whipping boys. In a further post which was dated 17 July 2016 I provided comments concerning Bruce’s Garson page and of course my recent post about your Walter Pidgeon video includes remarks about Greer and her screen partnership with Walter.
2 Great minds once again think alike for you and Work Horse agree on all of the Top 5 though I agree with him in the fine tuning because Random Harvest his No 1 is probably my own fave Garson or Colman movie. Fine posters from Remember, Desire Me, Strange Lady in Town and Sunrise at Campbello in which Greer player Eleanor Roosevelt to Ralph Bellamy’s Franklin D*** and I loved the stills of Garson/Colman, her and Donat and the one of that Gable kiss – wow! However for me the following must be singled out as being of par excellence: even by your standards
(1) Stupendous posters from Blossoms in the Dust especially the first of the two
(2) Your first poster from Julius Caesar with that chap who you think can’t speak too well cutting an imposing central figure.
(3) The superb posed still of Greer, Bob Taylor and my Joan in their prime when they were no doubt considered to be among “the beautiful people”
***Eleanor visited Greer and Ralph on the set during filming.
3 I was torn between a 9.4 and a 9/5 for this one and decided to be generous and give the 9.5/10 because Greer although born in England self-identified as Northern Irish because her mother and grandparent(s) were from here. Indeed writing now about Greer’s preference for being called an Irishwoman rather than an Englishwoman coincides well with an episode of Murder She Wrote that I have just watched starring Angela Lansbury [you know the woman Bruce thinks played Mature’s Delilah]. In one scene an Irish Tutor lecturing in a US university about detective work refers to that “great Irish detective Sherlock Holmes,” and of course some contrary pedant like John pipes up that Holmes was English, to which the Irish lecturer replies “English propaganda! They’ve always laid false claims to many Great people.”
4 However what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander because apparently over here locals often claim that Greer was born in the ancestral home in Castlewellan N Ireland. Just a pity you didn’t round off the excellence of this presentation by selecting Irish music for your soundtrack!
Thanks Bob, appreciate the generous rating, review, trivia, anecdote, observation, comparison and comment.
Have to confess that I’m not much of a Greer Garson fan, I’ve only seen two of her films – Adventure and Julius Caesar – and not because she was in them.
I’d certainly heard of Mrs Miniver when I was young and my movie knowledge started to grow but it wasn’t a film I was interested in seeing. The title itself was a turn off for young Steve who would much rather be watching a Randolph Scott western.
When I was a kid and couldn’t sleep instead of counting sheep I’d name all the Best Picture Oscar winners starting with Wings and when I got to the most recent one I’d run them off in reverse. If I still couldn’t sleep I’d start on the Best Actor winners, the ones I could remember.
When Greer Garson’s name comes up the only interesting film fact that pops up in my mind is the supposedly record-breaking length of her acceptance speech when she won her Oscar, various sources cite it as lasting 15 minutes – 30 minutes – and even 45 minutes from more than one source, which is completely unlikely, no one would just let her ramble on for 45mins. What was she doing, boring everyone with her life story? 🙂
Btw Random Harvest was the only one of the top 5 not to recieve 10 out of 10 from my sources, so it had no chance of hitting the top spot, it’s highest score was 9 from, who else, Leonard Maltin.
Apart from the top 5 recieving 10 and 9 scores, the only other high scorer was The Valley of Decision which went as high as 8.
Hey Bob, has it really been a year since you gasped at the audacity of this Lensman guy daring to call your idol ‘Mr. Mumbles’? Whoa! Ironically you’ve called him Mr. Mumbles far more than I have in the past 12 months. I’m glad it caught on. 🙂
STEVE As the saying goes “If you can’t beat them join them.”
STEVE
STEVE 1 “One man’s meat is another man’s poison” Fanatical film buffs like John and the Work Horse probably would have loved Greer to go on for TWO HOURS and 45 mins in her acceptance speech.
2 The most cringe inducing speech I can recall was I think the one given by Halle Berry when she accepted the Oscar for the 2002 Monster’s Ball
3 Everybody likes to get into the act at the Oscars. When Mr M got his Waterfront Oscar Bob Hope appeared and started to wrestle him for its possession with both men clutching each other by the throat and I’m told that Lancaster and Douglas came on one year and did a song and dance act though I never saw that for myself. One of the things they are supposed to have sung was “We’re not in the running this year!”
4 Let’s have more of Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway!
One of my favorite Oscar acceptance speeches was by Joe Pesci (remember him?), he walked on stage grabbed his Oscar (for Goodfellas) and said “It’s my privelege. Thank you!” and walked off, no messing about, no babble, no life story.
Hey Bruce no UMR page for Mr. Pesci? The guy’s an Oscar winner for chrissakes I mean you’ve done one for John Conway recently (or was it Frank Conway? I’ve already forgotten).
STEVE
1 Mental health experts claim that for most people exceptional highs must eventually be followed by lows so that moods can balance out. Some advanced mathematicians seem to feel that overall EVERYTHING ultimately balances out in one fashion or another.
2 If these experts are correct then it follows that in relation to the movies one performer who is over-praised will inadvertently be counter-balanced by another receiving under-appreciation. As on the Cogerson site we have Myrna Loy on the one hand and the excellent Joe Pesci on the other it would seem that the mathematicians may have a point..
I always liked Greer Garson. But, unlike my usual “personal problem” of naming just one or two favorite movies of an actor, in Garson’s case there really are 2 favs from her heyday and 2 from her later years that stand out for me. Those are Random Harvest and Pride and Prejudice/Strange Lady in Town and Sunrise at Campobello. I also like Goodbye, Mr. Chips very much, but to me that film belongs to Robert Donat. As with many classic actors/actresses, I have seen a lot of her movies (20) and I especially enjoyed Blossoms in the Dust and Mrs. Miniver, but compared to Pride and Prejudice to me they are the weaker vehicles.Her penultimate TV performance as Aunt Kathryn March in Little Women also holds a special place to my heart- seen it it my youth, before the name Greer Garson meant anything to me. Seeing this mini series today, it always gives me this special “Christmas feeling” that usually is lost once you reach adulthood.
Again, I’m a little surprised that my favorite (P&P) was one of her weaker box office successes, especially since she seemed to rule the box during her prime. On the other hand, I like the fact that Strange Lady did respecable business in it’s day 🙂
Hey Lupino….thanks for checking out and commenting on our Greer Garson page. I enjoyed reading your mini-reviews on so many of her movies. Your 20 is impressive but not gold impressive…lol.
1st Lyle. 24 Garson movies watched
2nd Lupino 20 Garson movies watched
3rd Flora 17 Garson movies watched
Larry. 12 Garson movies watched
Bern1960 10 Garson movies watched
Cogerson 6 Garson movies watched
Steve 2 Garson movies watched
Laurent 2 Garson movies watched
Pride and Prejudice was a decent hit ….maybe not a blockbuster….looking at the rest of the numbers….MGM took a 17% loss on the movie. Glad you like that Strange Lady did so well….probably because of Dana Andrews….lol. Thanks for sharing some of your thoughts on Greer Garson.
Cogerson
Greer Garson, despite looking striking in Technicolor with her red hair, did not make very many color movies at MGM. Her first appearance in color was in Blossoms in the Dust in 1941. Her second That Forsyth Woman in 1949. She made 3 color movies in the fifties and 4 in the sixties for a total of 9 color movies out of the total of 25 she made. Still, this is a higher percentage than her dramatic actress contemporaries like Davis, Crawford, and Stanwyck.
One probably unfortunate color miss was The Ziegfeld Follies in 1945. Garson wanted to do a music hall turn similar to what she had done in Random Harvest. MGM wanted her to do the great lady does an interview skit which eventually was done by Judy Garland. I think MGM blew this one. Garson had musical talent and I think they should have let her do her thing in her own way.
Hey John….thanks for the information on her color versus black and white movies. You are right….seems MGM missed an opportunity there. Same thing with her not getting a role in The Ziegfeld Follies. Good information….thanks for sharing.