Helen
You got to love Helen. This is the rare movie where the new wife who is a rich, sophisticated, and upper class in every way isn't portrayed as the villain, a snob, a person you're immediately supposed to hate just because she's the new wife and opposite in character to the first wife, the mom, and star of the show (Stella). This is really rare and almost never seen in the movies, and I'm not sure how often it happens in real life either. Helen is a nice, warm, great person, she's super understanding, patient to the end - she wants to marry Stephen but never turns bitter and ugly, she's a mom first and foremost, completely understanding mother/child love and how impossible and wrong it is to take a child, even an almost grown one away from their natural parent that she's lived with her whole life, which makes Helen very smart and warm, she's never manipulative for Stephen's own gain. Helen understands Stella like only a woman/another mom could, and her advice to Laurel is always intuitively on the mark and correct, somehow she knew Stella would never miss her daughter's wedding, and she would be standing outside in the rain watching because that's what she would do if the roles were reversed. As Stella would say "Helen's got stacks of style and class", you gotta love Helen, and Barbara O'Neil played her perfectly, this is Stany's movie all the way, but for me Barbara O'Neil's number two here, what a beautiful, perfect type of woman Helen is, I don't think Stephen Dallas deserves her, but Lollie and even Stella sure do.
This is one of the greatest movies of all time, it has it all, Idk why its not way more famous and talked about, this message board should be rocking, Stanwyck was never better, the whole cast is just about perfect, it's timeless, has a perfect ending, and its heartbreaking and uplifting all at the same time, and don't forget to have 3 Kleenex tissues in hand. Stella Dallas is a 10 star movie and deserves to be in IMDb's Top 250.