Mother Carey's Chickens is a 1938 drama film starring Anne Shirley and Ruby Keeler. The film was directed by Rowland V. Lee and based upon a 1917 play by Kate Douglas Wiggin and Rachel Crothers, which in turn was adapted from Wiggins' Mother Carey's Chickens. Originally Katharine Hepburn was assigned to the lead role. She refused, however, and left RKO in order to avoid having to appear in the film.
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Back in Hollywood, Lee was reunited with Small for The Toast of New York (1937), a biopic that was a notorious flop. It was made at RKO who also financed Lee's next film, Mother Carey's Chickens (1938).
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Brennan portrayed town drunk and accused murderer Muff Potter in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1938). Brennan followed it with The Texans (1938), Mother Carey's Chickens (1938), and Goldwyn's The Cowboy and the Lady (1938) with Gary Cooper – the first time Brennan played Cooper's sidekick.
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See entry "Mother Carey's Chickens" on p. 597 of the 1890 edition of Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable published by Cassell (London). This is available online from the Internet Archive. The poem in question can also be found on-line, for instance in the Lied and Art Song Texts Page.
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She is most noted for her 1910 performance in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. It was staged at the Republic Theater (New Victory Theater), 209 West 42nd Street. Her other successful theatrical performances include roles in Young Wisdom (1914), Tipping The Winner (1914), A Breath of Old Virginia (1915), Mother Carey's Chickens (1917), and The Bestsellers (1918).
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Her reputation at a low, the next film RKO offered her was Mother Carey's Chickens, a B movie with poor prospects. Hepburn turned it down, and instead opted to buy out her contract for $75,000.Hepburn (1991) p. 201. Many actors were afraid to leave the stability of the studio system at the time, but Hepburn's personal wealth meant she could afford to be independent.
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The siblings were subsequently invited to reprise their roles for a New York and road tour of the play, produced by the Shubert Brothers. When the show closed, Doris and her brother Charles, who had followed his four siblings into show business, resumed their work with Poli and appeared together in their first Broadway show, Mother Carey's Chickens at the Cort Theatre. The entire Eaton family relocated to New York City, where the children pursued their careers in various stage projects.
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In 1936, Columbia Pictures purchased a group of scripts, including the script for Holiday, from RKO for $80,000. Although the film was originally intended to reunite The Awful Truth co-stars Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, George Cukor decided to cast Hepburn instead,Edwards, pp. 164–165 and Columbia borrowed her from RKO, where she had just turned down the lead role in Mother Carey's Chickens. Joan Bennett and Ginger Rogers were also initially considered to play Hepburn's role,"Notes" on TCM.
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She then began getting parts in films playing dimwitted servants; most notably in such films as Vivacious Lady (1938), Mother Carey's Chickens (1938), Love Affair (1939), East Side of Heaven (1939), and Anne of Windy Poplars (1940). Well into the 1940s Kennedy made over twenty film appearances although a lot of her film roles were uncredited. In later years she made appearances on shows like the Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour, The Missourians, and The Lone Ranger. She also appeared as an uncredited Cockney in the film My Fair Lady (1964).
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Summer Magic is a 1963 Walt Disney Productions family musical film directed by James Neilson, and starring Hayley Mills, Burl Ives, and Dorothy McGuire in a story about an early 1900s Boston widow and her children taking up residence in a small town in Maine. The film was based on the novel Mother Carey's Chickens by Kate Douglas Wiggin. It was the fourth of six films that Mills appeared in for Disney, and the young actress received a Golden Globe nomination for her work. Mills later said it was the worst of the movies she made for Disney.
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Her fourth movie for Disney did less well though was still successful, Summer Magic (1963), a musical adaptation of the novel Mother Carey's Chickens. Ross Hunter hired her for a British- American production, The Chalk Garden (1964), playing a girl who torments governess Deborah Kerr. Back at Disney she was in a film about jewel thieves, The Moon-Spinners (1964), getting her first on screen kiss from Peter McEnery."The Day Hayley got in a Hearse", Photoplay, August 1964 Mills had a change of pace with Sky West and Crooked (1965), set in the world of gypsies, written by her mother and directed by her father.
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Her literary output included popular books for adults; with her sister, Nora A. Smith, she published scholarly work on the educational principles of Friedrich Fröbel: Froebel's Gifts (1895), Froebel's Occupations (1896), and Kindergarten Principles and Practice (1896); and she wrote the classic children's novel Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1903), as well as the 1905 best-seller Rose o' the River. Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm became an immediate bestseller; both it and Mother Carey's Chickens (1911) were adapted to the stage. Houghton Mifflin collected her writings in 10 volumes in 1917. For a time, she lived at Quillcote, her summer home in Hollis, Maine (now listed on the National Register of Historic Places).
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