Even 30 years since her death, Eve Arden still looms large.
If you don’t know her name, you know her work and, more vitally, you know her persona.
It’s because Eve Arden was so good, so sublime, at playing a particular type of characterization it has since all but been renamed in her honor. Even today, film fans and aficionados still talk about the “Eve Arden role” in a film or TV show.
Arden was the sassy sidekick, the one with the drop-dead zingers, the cutting comments, the acid asides delivered with such precision that they would always hit their target... but still managed to stop just short of drawing blood. Part of Arden’s gift was her ability to deliver these one-liners with deadpan accuracy but, in the process, still remain completely winning and likable.
Usually it was her character that was saying what we, the audience, were really feeling and thinking anyway.
Actually, while Arden might not have invented this type of role--the movies of the 1930’s were full of wisecracking dames - she nevertheless made it such her own that a slew of actress have built or developed their careers in a similar manner, all with a savvy series of retorts and sarcasm. Carrie Fisher comes to mind, as does Kathryn Hahn and just about every role that Wanda Sykes has ever taken on. The characterization is so strong it even leaps gender - consider Daniel Davis’ cutting character of Niles the butler on “The Nanny” or Robert Guillaume’s early “Soap”-based Benson.
In film, Eve Arden cut her teeth in such big-screen fair as “Stage Door,” “The Unfaithful,” and her Oscar-nominated turn in Joan Crawford’s “Mildred Pierce.” (Her immortal line from the latter, “Alligators have the right idea, they eat their young.”)
But if the movies made Eve Arden a star, it was radio and television that made her immortal. Like Lucy before her, though she was certainly no slouch on the big screen, it still took radio and, later, television for Arden to fully flower into an icon.
Her program “Our Miss Brooks” began on radio, over the CBS airwaves, on July 19, 1948. On the radio dial, the program was an immediate hit. Not long after its premiere, “Miss Brooks” was the number one comedy on the air.
As was becomingly increasingly common, the radio show was soon carried over to the newer medium of television.
Again over CBS, TV’s “Our Miss Brooks” made its debut in October of 1952. As was typical at the time, the shows ran concurrently over both mediums for several years.
In either incarnation, the set-up was basically the same. Miss Connie Brooks (Arden) was an English teacher at the fictional Madison High. Level-headed and witty, she often found herself surrounded by odd-balls and eccentrics, be they her students or her fellow professionals. Her chief foil in both the radio and TV versions was the schools’ obstinate, stuffy, and fussy Principal, Mr. Cocklin. (He was played in both versions by Gale Gordon.)
Miss Brooks also often interacted with a geeky, overeager student named Walter Denton. Then there was another character, too. In this show, originally described in the press as a “romantic comedy,” Miss Brooks had a bit of an unrequited crush on a fellow teacher, Mr. Boynton. Ironically, he was the school’s biology teacher but he always seemed more interested in the hamsters in his classroom than in matters of either love or lust.
When the show came to television, Arden and Gordon recreated their roles while an impossibly young looking Richard Crenna, who was actually 26 at the time, took on the role of Walton Denton and the Mr. Boynton character (played on radio by Jeff Chandler) was assumed by Robert Rockwell.
Airing on Friday nights, the show was soon a top 20 staple. It was not hard to see why.
Liberated fully from the sidelines, Arden was now the main character but, fear not, she still possessed that same sardonic edge. And once again, Miss Brooks was always, easily the smartest person in the room.
Not only did viewers welcome her, so, too, did her real-life professional counterparts. During her time playing the role, Arden was honored by the NEA for her distinguished portrayal of the teaching profession. Meanwhile, a 1994 paper presented at the Australian Association for Research in Education looked back at the character and its author wrote: “Miss Brooks [was] a ‘towering figure,’ able to rise above the absurdity of a ranger of pedagogical and administrative events in order to stand and deliver parody in ways that marked her as transcending the mundane.”
As the indomitable Miss Brooks, Arden wasn’t TV’s first working woman (that was already a well populated category thanks to a variety of shows and actresses like Hope Emerson, Lynn Bari, Vera Allen and Anna May Wong), but Arden’s name recognition and small screen success did pave the way for all the TV women after her who decided to take a career path other than marriage and motherhood.
In real-life, Eve Arden stood only 5”7’ but whether it was her footwear or her sheer lifeforce (or both) on “Our Miss Brooks,” Arden seems to dominate every scene she’s in with an above-it-all air and wisdom. Even her admitted romantic interest in the oblivious Mr. Boynton (the subject of much latter-day derision of the series by agenda-focused critics which have attempted to re-envision Miss Brooks as a stock “husband hunter”) cannot undermine the strength of her character. As erudite author Michale McWilliams, in his 1987 book “TV Sirens,” put it, “[Miss Brooks] could never resist sacrificing a bed partner for the Last Word.” In other words, she will not stoop to conquer.
But even if Miss Brooks was bit randy and ready-for-love, what of it? Funny that if Miss Brooks is shown as having a healthy, even lusty, interest in the opposite sex, she’s often labeled a desperate old maid but if Carrie Bradshaw does it on “Sex & the City,” or “Seinfeld’s” Elaine worries if a new man-friend is “sponge-worthy,” they are viewed as the epitome of post-modern feminism.
Furthermore, Arden was 44 years old when the show began on TV and actor Rockwell was over a full decade younger: Arden might have been TV’s first cougar.
“Our Miss Brooks” ran until 1956. Notably, as often happens with series in their very latter years, in the program’s final season, “Brooks” got slightly revamped - and the romantic script got flipped. In her new job, working at a private elementary school, Connie Brooks found herself the pursued due to lovestruck a PE teacher played by handsome actor Gene Barry.
After the end of “Miss Brooks,” Arden quickly returned to television in her own self-named show (“The Eve Arden Show”). In it, she played an authoress and traveling lecturer--and a single mother. That show ran from 1957 to 1958. She had greater success however from 1967-1969 co-starring with Kaye Ballard in the series “The Mothers-in-Law.” Later she had a big screen comeback - and a long-overdue promotion - when she played the school principal in the 1978 version of “Grease.”
Eve Arden worked consistently before and after “Brooks.” In fact, there was no medium that she didn’t triumphant in; she was even a consistent presence on the Broadway stage. Her final role was a guest spot on TV’s “Falcon Crest” in 1987. She passed away in 1990.
But her shadow hangs over thousands of legendary film, TV and radio characters, each and every time one of them utters droll and witty retort.
Even 30 years since her death, Eve Arden still looms large. 
In either incarnation, the set-up was basically the same. Miss Connie Brooks (Arden) was an English teacher at the fictional Madison High. Level-headed and witty, she often found herself surrounded by odd-balls and eccentrics, be they her students or her fellow professionals. Her chief foil in both the radio and TV versions was the schools’ obstinate, stuffy, and fussy Principal, Mr. Cocklin. (He was played in both versions by Gale Gordon.) 
But even if Miss Brooks was bit randy and ready-for-love, what of it? Funny that if Miss Brooks is shown as having a healthy, even lusty, interest in the opposite sex, she’s often labeled a desperate old maid but if Carrie Bradshaw does it on “Sex & the City,” or “Seinfeld’s” Elaine worries if a new man-friend is “sponge-worthy,” they are viewed as the epitome of post-modern feminism. 
After the end of “Miss Brooks,” Arden quickly returned to television in her own self-named show (“The Eve Arden Show”). In it, she played an authoress and traveling lecturer--and a single mother. That show ran from 1957 to 1958. She had greater success however from 1967-1969 co-starring with Kaye Ballard in the series “The Mothers-in-Law.” Later she had a big screen comeback - and a long-overdue promotion - when she played the school principal in the 1978 version of “Grease.”