In late 1939, Rosalind Russell began shooting the comedy His Girl Friday with Cary Grant. “She was so excited when he said to her one day, ‘I’d really like to have dinner with you on Friday night,’” recalls her son, Lance Brisson.

But when she and Cary sat down at L.A.’s famed Chasen’s restaurant, “this Danish guy comes over, thrust himself into the conversation, and she learned belatedly that she was being set up.” Two years later, she married the Danish guy, talent manager Freddie Brisson, and remained with him for the rest of her life.

Still, it took Freddie a while to convince Rosalind to date him. Like many of the powerful women she played during her five-decade career, including her best-known role, Auntie Mame, Rosalind was a force to reckon with.

“She was really a strong, smart woman,” Lance says. She had a lot of joy and empathy for others, and she often hid her own pain as she battled through health issues.

“Rosalind was a life affirmer, a fighter,” her husband once wrote, adding, “Like Scaramouche, she had been born ‘with the gift of laughter and the sense the world was mad.’”

The middle child of seven kids, “the ham in the sandwich,” Rosalind joked, she graduated from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and started acting in New York theater before Hollywood called.

“I was put into movies with Joan Crawford and Jean Harlow, and I was always taking their men away from them,” she wrote in her 1977 autobiography. In real life, Rosalind was friendly with everyone from Jimmy Stewart to Gary Cooper, but was called the Bachelor Girl of Hollywood until she fell for Freddie.

“He acts as a secretary, sweetheart, dancing partner,” Rosalind said. “He makes everything fun.”

In the 1940s, career-driven Rosalind “was making one movie after another,” Bernard Dick, author of Forever Mame: The Life of Rosalind Russell, tells Closer.

But her self-described “tendency to push too hard,” along with probable postpartum depression and the departure of three brothers and Freddie to join the military effort during World War II, led to Rosalind’s nervous breakdown.

“She was not one to give up,” explains Lance, who always felt loved, even in uncertain times. Rosalind was a very caring mother who — as a sports fan — really enjoyed taking her son to Dodgers games.

“I think she was most proud that she had a stable marriage and a son,” says Dick. Sadly, the breakdown wouldn’t be the last of her health troubles. Breast cancer led to a double mastectomy.

Then in 1969, she was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, a little-understood disease at the time. Rosalind, however, “traveled around the country drawing attention to [it, even though] she was suffering terribly,” Lance recalls.

Today, the University of California, San Francisco’s arthritis research center is named after her.

Rosalind died at 69 in 1976, but her legacy lives on through her memorable characters and her charity work. “She never forgot her roots,” Lance says. “Never forgot about people. She was a big believer in giving back, not just money, but her time, even though she had great difficulties herself.”