Leading lady: Worcester native mom of Bridges acting clan

Dorothy Louise Simpson Bridges – the wife of actor Lloyd Bridges and the mother of actors Beau and Jeff Bridges and artist Lucinda “Cindy” Bridges – started her incredible and colorful life in Worcester.

Her father worked at the Denholm & McKay department store downtown and, after her parents got married, she lived at 144 Austin St. before her family moved to Los Angeles.

To her husband and children, Dorothy Bridges played many roles, from acting coach to homemaker to gifted writer.

But the two roles she loved most were wife and mother.

“As a mother, I’ve felt most needed, more fulfilled and have made a somewhat creative and important contribution to my world,” Dorothy Bridges wrote in a two-page, typed letter to her children she gave them on Mother’s Day 1980. “I like thinking it wasn’t just any mother that could have made Beau, Jeff and Lucinda. … Of course, it wasn’t just any father, either, who planted the seed, endured my pregnancies and helped raised you.”

Dorothy Simpson took to writing as a young age. She sold a poem to the Los Angeles Times for $1 when she was 9 and in her youth had dreams of becoming “the Grandma Moses of the literary world.”

“The earliest I can remember I wanted to be a writer and to get married,” Dorothy Bridges said in her 10-page autobiographical essay “About Myself” in 1954.  “I started writing letters and poems as soon as I could put a sentence together.”

Dorothy’s father, Frederick Walter Simpson, was born in Liverpool, England, on Sept. 26, 1886. One of nine children in the family of a “poor blacksmith,” he left school after the fifth grade, ran away to sea and deserted ship in Boston.

In 1910, Simpson was living at 29 Gardner St. in Worcester while working as a retail salesman.

A year later, he married Violet Adeline Gamble, also a native of England, in Worcester. On Jan. 6, 1914, Violet died of per nephritis abscess at age 24 at St. Vincent Hospital.

Working as a clerk at Denholm's, Simpson bounced from place to place in Worcester. During a four-year stretch from 1912 to 1915, his residences included 44 Piedmont, 1 Alpine and 135 Highland streets.

According to Dorothy, Frederick Simpson gave his children plenty of tough love.

“My father has never known anything about being a good parent,” Dorothy Bridges said in “About Myself.” “In ignorance, I am sure, he has been almost sadistically cruel in his teasing of his children. I can never remember him enthusing over or approving of any of my achievements, yet I know he does so behind my back. I think he takes pride in the Englishman’s reputation of concealing sentiment and emotion.”

Parents met, married in Worcester

From 1910 to 1914, Louise M. Myles, Dorothy’s future mother, was living at 49 May St. and working as a saleslady in a Worcester department store. On Dec. 7, 1914, the two got married and were living at 144 Austin St.

On Sept. 19, 1915, Dorothy Louise Simpson was born in Worcester. Her family moved to Los Angeles when she was roughly 2 years old and her father became a manager at The Broadway department store.

In 1954, Dorothy described her parents as “two people who have fought with one another ever since (she was born) but who still live together in a fondly armed truce.” Despite all this, she said, “I consider myself well off with the parents God gave me.”

Lucinda Bridges fondly remembers her maternal grandfather, who lived into his 90s.

“My grandfather taught himself how to read. He read like crazy. He became an avid reader. And he was so poor as a sailor. When he had teeth problems, he ended up in port one day having all his teeth pulled out,” she said. “He was a real character, very British, Liverpool, but no accent at all. He had a very dry sense of humor. That’s probably where my mother got it from…And my grandmother was very funny as well.”

Dorothy Simpson had two brothers and one half-brother. Dorothy’s half-brother, William F. Simpson, who was born Dec. 20, 1911, in Worcester, died at 6 on April 24, 1918. Dorothy’s brother, Kenneth M. Simpson, was born in 1919 and died two years later, while her other brother, Frederick W. Simpson Jr. - known to Beau, Jeff and Lucinda as “Uncle Buddy” - was born in 1923 and died in 2018.

Despite her natural beauty and being the valedictorian of her graduating class at Fairfax High School, Dorothy Bridges wrestled with deeply rooted self-esteem issues that were probably instilled in her at an early age by her parents.

“I seemed destined to be an 'almost,' I was 'almost very pretty,' 'almost an outstanding student,' 'almost a talented actress,' 'almost sold a book I wrote,’” she wrote. “However, I am blessed with some sort of healthy ego or stoicism that keeps me from being bothered about this 'almostness.' ”

The only thing Dorothy Bridges feels she was a complete success in was her marriage to Lloyd "Bud" Bridges.

'I hit the jackpot'

“My marriage is the only part of my life where I do not find the 'almost' quality. Here I hit the jackpot, and it is still paying,” she said in “About Myself.” “My husband has his faults but he has been constantly and miraculously in love with me for 20 years, is attractive to look at, sound of mind and limb, a pillar of patience with me and the children, and most important of all, I still feel kind of tingly when I hear his voice.”

Simpson met her future husband while the two were attending UCLA. She was a freshman majoring in English, while he was a junior majoring in political science. Simpson, who was the lead in her high school senior play and had written the script for her graduation class musical, joined the University’s Dramatics Society, while Bridges was serving as the dramatic society’s president.

In 1933, Simpson passed the tryouts and landed a small part in the university’s production of Harry Wagstaff Gribble’s “March Hares,” in which Bridges had the starring role.

“There in the shadows of Royce Hall rehearsals, I fell in love with him,” she recalled. “He never knew it but, by the time the play had finished its run, I had already decided to marry him and had selected a name of our firstborn.”

In her writings, Dorothy Bridges fondly remembers their first kiss.

“We sat in the rumble seat of his friend’s car on our way home from a fraternity dance. It was cool and windy back there, so naturally he (Lloyd Bridges) had to have his arm around me for protection," she recalled. "Then the first kiss happened and that one kiss lasted all the way to my house. I didn’t want it to stop, ever. It seemed like he didn’t want it to end either."

Annual valentines for life

A year later, Dorothy Simpson wrote her first Valentine’s Day card to the love of her life, an annual tradition she continued to do after her husband’s death on March 10, 1998, and every year until she died in 2009.

At the urging of her daughter, Dorothy Bridges published “You Caught Me Kissing: A Love Story,” a collection of love poems she wrote to her husband.

“My mom loved Valentine’s Day,” Lucinda Bridges recalled, “I still remember the doilies and making our own.”

Published in 2005 when Dorothy Bridges was 89, “You Caught Me Kissing: A Love Story” chronicles her endearing romance with her husband through a series of personal poems sent out on Valentine’s Day and also includes cherished family photos and personal commentary from her three children.

“If I would draw my mother, the line would be in charcoal – the enduring bold mark of her strength and ability to blend, underscored by the initial ember of her warmth and random tongue of wit and fire,” Lucinda Bridges wrote in her mother’s book. “Dorothy Louise Simpson Bridges nurtured our family that became a garden. She tended us as unique souls and set us free in a landscape of unconditional love."

“Whether playing games together, reading stories or writing poetry, my mom instilled in us all a tremendous sense of the importance of family, as well as the value of expressions of love,” Beau Bridges said. “How lucky I am to have this devoted, loving, vital humorous, gifted lady as my mother.”

“I think of my mother as something of a master journalist. She’s kept a diary every day of her life since her wedding day,” Jeff Bridges said. “She’s truly a remarkable woman.”

In his senior year at UCLA, Bridges hung his fraternity pin on his future wife. But the romance came to a halt when he told her just before his graduation that he has decided to go to New York to become a professional actor.

She was devastated.

“With great misgiving and insecurity, I saw him off to New York where he was to seek his fortune as an actor. I wrote to him every day for almost two years. He kept up a steady though sporadic correspondence, but I knew he was carrying on with another woman at the same time,” she wrote in her book.

Two years later, Simpson graduated from UCLA but was still struggling to get Bridges out of her heart. Then, suddenly, her estranged boyfriend called to say he was visiting his mother and asked her if she would like to meet him there.

Against her better judgment, she said yes.

“After dinner with his family, we went hand-in-hand for a walk in the warm dark night,” Dorothy recalled. “Without warning he roughly pushed me against the broad trunk of a sycamore tree and kissed me with all the passion that had been banked up from our two years apart. I swear, I heard a thousand violins playing. My God, I though, we’re still in love.”

Bridges told Simpson that she should come back to New York with him, get a little apartment near his and take a stab at being a writer.

A quick proposal

She said “No” and told him she wouldn’t go back to New York with him unless he married her.

Then, Bridges popped the question.

“You haven’t much to offer my daughter,” Dorothy’s father said, according to his daughter’s book. “No money, no job, no prospects. What are you going to live on?”

The aspiring actor had no answer for Dorothy’s dad, for his only steady income was a recording contract with the American Association for the Blind at $75 a month.

“I knew I wasn’t marrying a financial genius when he took a three-year lease on an apartment that cost $75 a month,” Dorothy Bridges said. “But hey, we couldn’t have been any happier even if we had been rich.”

On Oct. 14, 1938, the couple were married in New York in the Little Church Around the Corner, nicknamed the “actor’s church.”

After years of struggling, Bridges landed a part in a Broadway play. Then he was asked to make a screen test that led to a movie contract.

As a contract player for Columbia Pictures, Bridges appeared in such films as 1943’s “Sahara,” 1945’s “A Walk in the Sun,” 1951’s “Little Big Horn and 1952’s “High Noon.”

A name picked out years before

Soon after Lloyd and Dorothy Bridges returned to California, the couple had their first child on Dec. 9, 1941. And they gave him the name Dorothy had picked out many years before.

“Our first born, Beau, a son – Just what we’d ordered, with inner and outer beauty greater than dared hope for,” Dorothy Bridges wrote in the letter she gave to her three children on Mother’s Day in 1980.

The family welcomed a second son on June 14, 1948, but parental bliss was short-lived when Garry Bridges died in his sleep from interstitial pneumonia on Aug. 3 that year.

On Dec. 4, 1949, the Bridges were blessed with the birth of a “dimpled, good-natured, strong, creative doll-boy" they named Jeff.

“My love for you, Jeff, from that first sound of your lusty cry in the delivery room, has been so intense, so possessive, that I’m amazed you turned out to be “normal” (note the quotes) as you are,” Dorothy Bridges wrote.

A daughter joins two brothers

On Oct. 18, 1953, the family welcomed a daughter into the fold.

“In my 38th year, beauteous Lucinda arrived,” Dorothy Bridges said. “With her came another great and special love – a mother’s love for a daughter, intense and very different from any other loving."

When he landed the role of former Navy diver Mike Nelson on the TV series “Sea Hunt,” Lloyd Bridges became a international star.

And the series became a family affair. Dorothy Bridges and their two sons appeared on the show. And Lucinda almost appeared in one episode.

“I was probably 5 or 6 and my mom didn’t want me to do it because I had a cold and she did not want me to go into the ocean," Lucinda Bridges recalled. "And, my dad said it probably cure her if she did. In ’59, we got a beach house for $5,000 down and still have it today. And my dad would always say when you’re starting to feel ill just jump in the ocean.”

Lucinda Bridges also fondly recalls “Salon Night,” an evening of impromptu parlor games and performances with some of her parents’ famous friends, who included Jeff’s godparents, Larry Parks, best known for playing Al Jolson in 1946’s “The Jolson Story,” his wife, Betty Garrett, who played Archie Bunker’s neighbor Irene Lorenzo on “All in the Family,” Burt Lancaster and Joel McCrea.

In the latter part of his career, Lloyd Bridges reinvented himself as a comedic talent in such parody films as 1991’s “Hot Shots!” and 1998’s "Jane Austen’s Mafia!,” as well as the Emmy-nominated role of Izzy Mandelbaum, a 80-year-old fitness nut who hates to lose, on “Seinfeld.”

But his most memorable and funniest role was that of substance abusing air tower supervisor Steve McCroskey in 1980's "Airplane!"

Lucinda Bridges fondly recalls the family’s reaction seeing their dad in the film for the first time during a private screening of “Airplane!”

“The drug line, ‘Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue,’ that was a little stymie for my dad but, at the same time, he’s an actor,” Lucinda Bridges said. “He used to always say, ‘Your body is your temple.’ So he wasn’t anything like his character in ‘Airplane!’ We all cracked up and laughed. We all loved it. It was great.”

The Bridges brothers both follow their father’s footsteps and become accomplished actors in their own right.

Beau's projects include 1975’s “The Other Side of the Mountain, 1977’s “Greased Lightning,” 1979’s “Norma Rae,” 1983’s “Heart Like a Wheel,” 1984’s “The Hotel New Hampshire,” 1998’s “Maximum Bob,” and 2005’s “Stargate SG-1.” Jeff starred in 1971’s “The Last Picture Show,” 1982’s “Tron,” 1984’s “Starman,” 1988’s “Tucker: The Man and His Dream,” 1991’s “The Fisher King,” 1998’s “The Big Lebowski,” 2000’s “The Contender,” 2008’s “Iron Man” and “Crazy Heart,” for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor.

In all cases, Dorothy Bridges was her sons’ biggest supporter, and sometimes, in the confidence of their sister, their harshest critic.

“When we went to the screening for 'The Big Lebowski,’ as soon as his character comes on and talks about a minute or two, my mom leans over and she says to me, whispers, of course, ‘I hate it already,’ ” Lucinda Bridges recalled,

Lucinda Bridges is the only sibling who didn’t pursue an acting career, despite her father’s urging.

“I loved acting and we did it as play at home,” she said. “My dad would throw me in stuff. And I had fun. I did summer theater back east. But it just never bit me like a bug.

“I, too, much wanted to be a homemaker. I really loved it. I love to cook. I love raising kids. I love animals,” Lucinda Bridges said. “My mother was my example. So ever since I was a very little girl, I knew what I wanted more than anything was to have a family and to have children.”

Lloyd Bridges’ death in 1998 closed the book on the couple's 59-year marriage but not an end to their love.

“Not everyone finds a love that lasts a lifetime and then some, and she found hers,” Beau Bridges wrote in 2013. “My mom and dad were devoted to each other…and the joy they shared as a couple spilled over onto their friends and family.”

On Mother’s Day in 1980, Dorothy Bridges thanked Beau, Jeff and Lucinda Bridges in a letter for always being there.

“The good times are made better and the bad times made easier because you share them,” Dorothy Bridges said. “Thank you, my children. And thanks for the pride you’ve given me in your work ... Thanks for the satisfaction I have in knowing that from me three exceptionally loving and caring human beings have one into their own worlds and made living there a better place for everyone else.”

On Feb. 16, 2009, Dorothy Bridges died in her daughter’s arms at home in Holmby Hills, California. She was 93.

“She (Dorothy Bridges) was the hub of the family,” Jeff Bridges told the Los Angeles Times. “My dad was sort of the front man. He was out there getting public attention. But my mom was behind the scenes, sort of holding the whole thing together, and she did that with her own particular brand of verve.”

Beau Bridges said his mother never pulled any of her punches and always said it like it is. But, at the same time, she loved her husband and children dearly, was capable of great forgiveness and was never one to hold a grudge.

“At the end, she talked of wanting us to let her go. ‘Go, Beau,’ she said to me. And then she said, ‘Kiss me.’ I did. And then she said it again,” Beau Bridges recalled in 2013. “So it went several times. And I kissed her again and again…Kissing came natural to my mom…and so did love.”

While Dorothy Bridges was a big fan of her husband and son’s acting endeavors, she also strongly encouraged her daughter’s artistic pursuits in drawing, paintings and poetry, especially when she received an original art creation from her youngest child on a holiday, birthday or other special occasions.

Although they lost their mother 14 years ago, like their father, her spirit lives on within each of her grown children and that spirit of family has been passed down to Beau, Jeff and Lucinda Bridges’ children and it is starting to be passed down to their children’s children.

“I adore and love my mother for what she gave to us. The boys, my brothers, have always said how amazing our parents and childhood were,” Lucinda Bridges said. “We continually reflect on the memories of our blessed childhood, which in turn was carried on raising our own children and now been passed on to theirs. Our mother always felt that would be her immortality.”

Thank you to genealogist and history buff Paul F. Brueggemann of Shrewsbury whose research into Dorothy Simpson’s genealogy proved most helpful in establishing her family timeline in Worcester.

This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: Beau, Jeff, Lucinda Bridges recall mother, native of Worcester