crème de la crème

Jai Ganesh · 2023-05-03 00:16:57

1265) Elizabeth Taylor

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Dame Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor DBE (February 27, 1932 – March 23, 2011) was a British-American actress. She began her career as a child actress in the early 1940s and was one of the most popular stars of classical Hollywood cinema in the 1950s. She then became the world's highest paid movie star in the 1960s, remaining a well-known public figure for the rest of her life. In 1999, the American Film Institute named her the seventh-greatest female screen legend of Classic Hollywood cinema.

Born in London to socially prominent American parents, Taylor moved with her family to Los Angeles in 1939. She made her acting debut with a minor role in the Universal Pictures film There's One Born Every Minute (1942), but the studio ended her contract after a year. She was then signed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and became a popular teen star after appearing in National Velvet (1944). She transitioned to mature roles in the 1950s, when she starred in the comedy Father of the Bride (1950) and received critical acclaim for her performance in the drama A Place in the Sun (1951). She starred in "Ivanhoe" with Robert Taylor and Joan Fontaine. (1952). Despite being one of MGM's most bankable stars, Taylor wished to end her career in the early 1950s. She resented the studio's control and disliked many of the films to which she was assigned. She began receiving more enjoyable roles in the mid-1950s, beginning with the epic drama Giant (1956), and starred in several critically and commercially successful films in the following years. These included two film adaptations of plays by Tennessee Williams: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959); Taylor won a Golden Globe for Best Actress for the latter. Although she disliked her role as a call girl in BUtterfield 8 (1960), her last film for MGM, she won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance.

They starred in 11 films together, including The V.I.P.s (1963), The Sandpiper (1965), The Taming of the Shrew (1967), and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). Taylor received the best reviews of her career for Woolf, winning her second Academy Award and several other awards for her performance. She and Burton divorced in 1974 but reconciled soon after, remarrying in 1975. The second marriage ended in divorce in 1976.

Taylor's acting career began to decline in the late 1960s, although she continued starring in films until the mid-1970s, after which she focused on supporting the career of her sixth husband, United States Senator John Warner (R-Virginia). In the 1980s, she acted in her first substantial stage roles and in several television films and series. She became the second celebrity to launch a perfume brand, after Sophia Loren. Taylor was one of the first celebrities to take part in HIV/AIDS activism. She co-founded the American Foundation for AIDS Research in 1985 and the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation in 1991. From the early 1990s until her death, she dedicated her time to philanthropy, for which she received several accolades, including the Presidential Citizens Medal. Throughout her career, Taylor's personal life was the subject of constant media attention. She was married eight times to seven men, converted to Judaism, endured several serious illnesses, and led a jet set lifestyle, including assembling one of the most expensive private collections of jewellery in the world. After many years of ill health, Taylor died from congestive heart failure in 2011, at the age of 79.

Additional Information

Elizabeth Taylor, in full Dame Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor, (born February 27, 1932, London, England—died March 23, 2011, Los Angeles, California, U.S.), was an American motion picture actress noted for her unique beauty and her portrayals of volatile and strong-willed characters.

Taylor’s American parents were residing in England at the time of her birth. Shortly before the outbreak of World War II, the family returned to the United States, settling in Los Angeles. Her father was an art dealer, and his business brought him into contact with members of the Hollywood elite. Though her mother, a former stage actress, initially balked at allowing the young Taylor to enter the film industry, an introduction to the chairman of Universal Pictures through one of her father’s clients led to a screen test. In 1942 Taylor made her first film, There’s One Born Every Minute. Though she was soon dropped by Universal, MGM Studios signed her to a contract and cast her in Lassie Come Home (1943). That was followed by a star-making performance in National Velvet (1944) as a young woman who rescues a horse and trains it to race.

Taylor made a smooth transition from juvenile to adult roles in the films Life with Father (1947), Father of the Bride (1950), and An American Tragedy (1951). She appeared as the frivolous wife of a writer in The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954) and as an East Coast woman who marries the patriarch of a disintegrating Texas ranching family (played by Rock Hudson) in Giant (1956). In Raintree County (1957), Taylor channeled a deracinated Southern belle who marries an abolitionist (Montgomery Clift). Her mature screen persona— that of a glamorous, passionate woman unafraid of expressing love and anger—was at its apogee in film adaptations of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959).

Taylor won an Academy Award for her performance as a conflicted New York call girl in Butterfield 8 (1960), though she publicly expressed her dislike of the film. She met and fell in love with the British actor Richard Burton while they were filming Cleopatra (1963). Both were still married at the time, and their affair became a scandal. The couple was hounded by photographers and denounced as immoral in forums as diverse as the Vatican newspaper and the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. The two ultimately divorced their respective spouses and were themselves married twice (1964–74, 1975–76).

Taylor won a second Academy Award for her performance opposite Burton as the vituperative but vulnerable Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), directed by Mike Nichols from the play by Edward Albee. She costarred with him again in an adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew (1967); the couple made five further films together. After the mid-1970s, however, Taylor appeared only intermittently in films, Broadway plays, and television films.

Taylor’s closely scrutinized personal life presaged the advent of the tabloid frenzy of the latter decades of the 20th century. Her eight marriages provided no shortage of fodder: among her husbands were film producer Michael Todd, singer Eddie Fisher, and U.S. Sen. John Warner. An active philanthropist, Taylor helped to establish the American Foundation for AIDS Research (1985), partly motivated by the death of her friend Rock Hudson from the disease. She traveled the world as spokeswoman for the organization and in 1991 established the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation to provide direct services to those suffering from the disease. Taylor also used the allure of her public image to market lucrative perfume and costume jewelry lines. In 1993 she received the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award. She received the French Legion of Honour in 1987 and was made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 2000.

Jai Ganesh · 2023-05-04 21:37:12

1266) Greta Garbo

Summary

Greta Garbo (born Greta Lovisa Gustafsson; 18 September 1905 – 15 April 1990) was a Swedish-American actress. Regarded as one of the greatest screen actresses of all time, she was known for her melancholic, somber persona, her film portrayals of tragic characters, and her subtle and understated performances. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Garbo fifth on its list of the greatest female stars of classic Hollywood cinema.

Garbo launched her career with a secondary role in the 1924 Swedish film The Saga of Gösta Berling. Her performance caught the attention of Louis B. Mayer, chief executive of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), who brought her to Hollywood in 1925. She stirred interest with her first American silent film, Torrent (1926). Garbo's performance in Flesh and the Devil (1927), her third movie, made her an international star. In 1928, Garbo starred in A Woman of Affairs, which catapulted her at MGM to its highest box-office star, surpassing the long-reigning Lillian Gish. Other well-known Garbo films from the silent era are The Mysterious Lady (1928), The Single Standard (1929) and The Kiss (1929).

With Garbo's first sound film, Anna Christie (1930), MGM marketers enticed the public with the tagline "Garbo talks!" That same year she starred in Romance and for her performances in both films she received the first of three nominations for the Academy Award for Best Actress. By 1932 her success allowed her to dictate the terms of her contracts and she became increasingly selective about her roles. She continued in films such as Mata Hari (1931), Susan Lenox (Her Fall and Rise) (1931), Grand Hotel (1932), Queen Christina (1933) and Anna Karenina (1935).

Many critics and film historians consider her performance as the doomed courtesan Marguerite Gautier in Camille (1936) to be her finest and the role gained her a second Academy Award nomination. However, Garbo's career soon declined and she became one of many stars labelled box office poison in 1938. Her career revived with a turn to comedy in Ninotchka (1939), which earned her a third Academy Award nomination. But after the failure of Two-Faced Woman (1941), she retired from the screen at the age of 35 after acting in 28 films. In 1954, Garbo was awarded an Academy Honorary Award "for her luminous and unforgettable screen performances".

After retiring, Garbo declined all opportunities to return to the screen, shunned publicity, and led a private life. She became an art collector whose paintings included works by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Pierre Bonnard and Kees van Dongen.

Details

Greta Garbo, original name Greta Lovisa Gustafsson, (born September 18, 1905, Stockholm, Sweden—died April 15, 1990, New York, New York, U.S.), was a Swedish American actress who was one of the most glamorous and popular motion-picture stars of the 1920s and ’30s. She was best known for her portrayals of strong-willed heroines, most of them as compellingly enigmatic as Garbo herself.

The daughter of an itinerant labourer, Greta Gustafsson was reared in poverty in a Stockholm slum. She was working as a department-store clerk when she met film director Erik Petschler, who gave her a small part in Luffar-Petter (1922; Peter the Tramp). From 1922 to 1924 she studied at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, and in 1924 she played a major role in Gösta Berlings Saga (The Saga of Gösta Berling). The film’s director, Mauritz Stiller, gave her the name Garbo, and in 1925 he secured her a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) in Hollywood.

At first, MGM chief Louis B. Mayer was skeptical of Garbo’s talent, but he and all studio executives were impressed by the initial rushes of her first American film, The Torrent (1926). Garbo projected a luminous quality that was perfect for silent pictures, motivating Mayer to sign her to an exclusive contract and raise her salary even before she completed work on this film. Throughout the remainder of the decade, Garbo appeared in such popular romantic dramas as Flesh and the Devil (1927), Love (1927), A Woman of Affairs (1928), and The Kiss (1929). She often costarred with John Gilbert, with whom she was romantically involved off-screen. Garbo’s success during this stage of her career was based not only on her mysterious, ethereal screen persona but also on public interest in the Garbo-Gilbert affair.

Sound allowed for Garbo to become an even bigger star, although her popularity was always greater in Europe than in the United States. “Garbo talks!” was MGM’s promotional tagline for Anna Christie (1930), Garbo’s first sound film. Her first spoken words on-screen—“Give me a whiskey”—revealed a husky resonant voice that added to her allure and her somewhat androgynous persona that has appealed to both genders throughout the years. It was also one of two films she made in 1930—the other being Romance—for which Garbo received an Academy Award nomination. She poignantly portrayed an aging ballerina in the all-star classic Grand Hotel (1932), the film in which she first uttered her signature line, “I want to be alone.” Her stardom was such at this point that she was billed merely as “Garbo” for the film.

Modern critics are divided as to whether Garbo’s best films of the 1930s are the period vehicles, which were always her most successful, or those set in contemporary times, in which she in many ways embodied the cinema’s first modern emancipated woman. Her leading roles in Mata Hari (1932) and Queen Christina (1933) were among her most popular, and they were mildly scandalous for their frank-as-the-times-would-permit treatment of eroticism and bisexuality, respectively. Garbo portrayed contemporary protagonists in As You Desire Me (1932) and The Painted Veil (1934), the latter film being highly reminiscent of the type of love-triangle potboilers Garbo made during her silent days. Her three best-known films of the 1930s, and the roles upon which the Garbo mystique is largely based, are Anna Karenina (1935), in which Garbo portrayed Leo Tolstoy’s title character; Camille (1936), in which Garbo delivers one of her most radiant and compelling performances as Alexandre Dumas fils’s tragic heroine; and Ninotchka (1939), an Ernst Lubitsch-directed farce in which Garbo, in a somewhat self-parodying turn as a Russian agent, proved herself a capable comic performer. Perhaps her most enduringly popular film, Ninotchka garnered another Oscar nomination for Garbo.

World War II may have been a factor in the end of Garbo’s screen career. Because her films had been more popular abroad than at home and because markets for American films were swiftly dissipating throughout occupied European countries, it has been said that executives at MGM conspired to kill Garbo’s career by casting her in a film they knew would bomb, the comic misfire Two-Faced Woman (1941). Contrary to popular perception, Garbo did not leave Hollywood in disgust after this film. She was nearly lured back to the screen twice—once to portray George Sand, the other time to star in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Paradine Case (1947)—but instead chose permanent retirement, a move that added to her enigma and increased her cult following. After a screen career of 20 years, Garbo lived the next five decades in her New York City apartment and made no public appearances. She was awarded an honorary Oscar in 1955; true to form, she did not attend the ceremonies.

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Jai Ganesh · 2023-05-06 00:10:41

1267) Vivien Leigh

Vivien Leigh (born Vivian Mary Hartley; 5 November 1913 – 8 July 1967), styled as Lady Olivier after 1947, was a British actress. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress twice, for her definitive performances as Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939) and Blanche DuBois in the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), a role she had also played on stage in London's West End in 1949. She also won a Tony Award for her work in the Broadway musical version of Tovarich (1963). Although her career had periods of inactivity, in 1999 the American Film Institute ranked Leigh as the 16th-greatest female movie star of classic Hollywood cinema.

After completing her drama school education, Leigh appeared in small roles in four films in 1935 and progressed to the role of heroine in Fire Over England (1937). Lauded for her beauty, Leigh felt that her physical attributes sometimes prevented her from being taken seriously as an actress. Despite her fame as a screen actress, Leigh was primarily a stage performer. During her 30-year career, she played roles ranging from the heroines of Noël Coward and George Bernard Shaw comedies to classic Shakespearean characters such as Ophelia, Cleopatra, Juliet and Lady Macbeth. Later in life, she performed as a character actress in a few films.

At the time, the public strongly identified Leigh with her second husband, Laurence Olivier, who was her spouse from 1940 to 1960. Leigh and Olivier starred together in many stage productions, with Olivier often directing, and in three films. She earned a reputation for being difficult to work with and for much of her life, she had bipolar disorder, as well as recurrent bouts of chronic tuberculosis, which was first diagnosed in the mid-1940s and ultimately led to her death at age 53.

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Vivien Leigh, original name Vivian Mary Hartley, (born November 5, 1913, Darjeeling, India—died July 8, 1967, London, England), was a British actress who achieved motion picture immortality by playing two of American literature’s most celebrated Southern belles, Scarlett O’Hara and Blanche DuBois.

The daughter of a Yorkshire stockbroker, she was born in India and convent-educated in England and throughout Europe. Inspired by the example of her schoolmate Maureen O’Sullivan, she embarked upon an acting career, enrolling at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1932. That same year she married her first husband, British barrister Herbert Leigh Holman, and adopted his middle name as her professional name. After her film debut in Things Are Looking Up (1934), she appeared in several more British “quota quickies” before making her first stage appearance in The Green Sash (1935). Although she possessed a weak stage voice at this point in her career, her stunning stage presence and beauty were impossible to ignore, and in 1935 she was signed to a contract by movie mogul Alexander Korda. During her initial burst of film stardom Leigh began an affair with British leading man Laurence Olivier, then married to actress Jill Esmond. The two lovers would subsequently appear together on stage and screen, notably in Korda’s Fire Over England (1937) and 21 Days (filmed 1937, released 1940; also released as 21 Days Together).

In 1938 Olivier and Leigh traveled to Hollywood, he to star in Samuel Goldwyn’s Wuthering Heights (1939), she to audition for the highly coveted role of Scarlett O’Hara in the David O. Selznick production of Margaret Mitchell’s best-seller Gone with the Wind (1939). Much to the surprise of industry insiders, she won the role over hundreds of candidates. Her unforgettable screen portrayal of Mitchell’s resilient heroine earned her not only international popularity but also an Academy Award. She capped this professional high point with her 1940 marriage to Olivier; the newlyweds subsequently costarred in the historical drama That Hamilton Woman (1941), acclaimed by Sir Winston Churchill as his all-time favourite film.

Pregnant during production of Caesar and Cleopatra in 1944 (released 1946), Leigh suffered an on-set accident that resulted in a miscarriage. While some film historians have traced her subsequent struggle with manic-depressive psychosis to this incident, other reports indicate that she evinced signs of her illness as early as the late 1930s. Despite her fragile health (she also suffered from tuberculosis), she continued to work in films and on stage in England and America. Throughout the 1940s she toured extensively with the Old Vic and Stratford companies in classical productions. She earned a second Academy Award for her searing portrayal of the tragically delusional Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), the screen version of the Tennessee Williams play.

Leigh’s mental and physical instability, aggravated by her deteriorating marriage to Olivier (they divorced in 1960), made it increasingly difficult for her to work in the late 1950s and early ’60s. She rallied long enough to deliver excellent screen performances in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1961) and Ship of Fools (1965), and to star in a 1963 Broadway musical adaptation of Tovarich, a disastrous production for which Leigh nonetheless won a Tony Award. She ended her career on a note of triumph in the 1966 New York staging of Anton Chekhov’s Ivanov. Leigh was in the midst of rehearsals for a stage production of Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance when she was found dead in her London apartment.

Jai Ganesh · 2023-05-08 00:21:57

1268) Bette Davis

Summary

Ruth Elizabeth "Bette" Davis (April 5, 1908 – October 6, 1989) was an American actress with a career spanning more than 50 years and 100 acting credits. She was noted for playing unsympathetic, sardonic characters, and was famous for her performances in a range of film genres, from contemporary crime melodramas to historical films, suspense horror, and occasional comedies, although her greater successes were in romantic dramas. A recipient of two Academy Awards, she was the first thespian to accrue ten nominations.

Bette Davis appeared on Broadway in New York, then the 22-year-old Davis moved to Hollywood in 1930. After some unsuccessful films, she had her critical breakthrough playing a vulgar waitress in Of Human Bondage (1934) although, contentiously, she was not among the three nominees for the Academy Award for Best Actress that year. The next year, her performance as a down-and-out actress in Dangerous (1935) did land Davis her first Best Actress nomination, and she won. In 1937, she tried to free herself from her contract with Warner Brothers Studio; although she lost the legal case, it marked the start of more than a decade as one of the most celebrated leading ladies of U.S. cinema. The same year, she starred in Marked Woman, a film regarded as one of the most important in her early career. Davis's portrayal of a strong-willed 1850s southern belle in Jezebel (1938) won her a second Academy Award for Best Actress and was the first of five consecutive years in which she received a Best Actress nomination; the others were for Dark Victory (1939), The Letter (1940), The Little Foxes (1941) and Now, Voyager (1942).

Davis was known for her forceful and intense style of acting and gained a reputation as a perfectionist in her craft. She could be combative and confrontational with studio executives and film directors, as well as with her co-stars, expecting the same high standard of performance and commitment from them as she expected from herself. Her forthright manner, idiosyncratic speech, and ubiquitous cigarette contributed to a public persona that has been often imitated.

She played a Broadway star in All About Eve (1950), which earned her another Oscar nomination and won her the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actress. Her last Oscar nomination was for What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), which also starred her famous rival Joan Crawford. In the latter stage of her career, her most successful films were Death on the Nile (1978) and The Whales of August (1987). Her career went through several periods of eclipse, but despite a long period of ill health she continued acting in film and on television until shortly before her death from breast cancer in 1989. She admitted that her success had often been at the expense of her personal relationships. She was married four times, divorcing three and widowed once, when her second husband died unexpectedly. She raised her children largely as a single parent. Her daughter, B. D. Hyman, wrote a controversial memoir about her childhood, 1985's My Mother's Keeper.

Davis was the co-founder of the Hollywood Canteen, a free club for food, dancing and entertainment for servicemen during World War II, and was the first female president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. She was also the first woman to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Film Institute. In 1999, Davis was placed second behind Katharine Hepburn on the American Film Institute's list of the greatest female stars of the classical Hollywood cinema era.

Details

Bette Davis, original name Ruth Elizabeth Davis, (born April 5, 1908, Lowell, Massachusetts, U.S.—died October 6, 1989, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France), was a versatile, volatile American actress, whose raw, unbridled intensity kept her at the top of her profession for 50 years.

Davis developed a taste for acting while attending her mother’s alma mater, Cushing Academy in Massachusetts. After gaining a smattering of experience in summer stock, she was accepted by John Murray Anderson’s acting school, where she quickly became a star pupil. In 1929 she made her first Broadway appearances, in The Earth Between and Broken Dishes, which led to a movie contract with Universal Pictures. Upon her arrival in Hollywood, however, the studio executives determined that she had no “gender appeal,” and, after a series of thankless roles in such films as Bad Sister (1931) and a handful of equally unrewarding loan-outs to other studios, Universal dropped her option. The dispirited young actress was on the verge of looking for another line of work when actor Murray Kinnell, with whom she had appeared in The Menace (1932), recommended her to play the ingenue in Warner Brothers’ The Man Who Played God (1932). The positive critical response to her work in this film prompted Warner Brothers to sign Davis to a contract.

After a series of undemanding roles for Warner Brothers, she begged the studio to lend her to RKO Radio Pictures to play the vicious, relentlessly unsympathetic Mildred in Of Human Bondage (1934), a film version of W. Somerset Maugham’s novel. Davis’s bravura performance as Mildred won her critical acclaim and industry respect, but studio politics prevented her from receiving an Academy Award. She subsequently won what many considered a “consolation” Oscar for her portrayal of an alcoholic, self-destructive actress in Dangerous (1935).

Her achievements notwithstanding, Warner Brothers continued to cast Davis in roles she considered beneath her talents and refused to pay her what she felt she was worth. Suspended by the studio for turning down yet another inconsequential role, she went to England to seek better roles. When Warner Brothers blocked her from doing any work outside of her contract, she sued the studio—and lost. In the long run, however, she won: upon returning to Warner Brothers, she was lavishly indulged. Her salary demands were met, and her choice of screen assignments improved dramatically. She went on to win a second Oscar, for Jezebel (1938), the first of three rewarding collaborations with director William Wyler. Her other notable vehicles from this period included Dark Victory (1939), for which she received an Oscar nomination; Juarez (1939), in which she played the archduchess Carlota; and The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939), in which she portrayed Queen Elizabeth I.

During the 1940s Davis made several successful movies, including The Letter (1940), The Little Foxes (1941), Now, Voyager (1942), Watch on the Rhine (1943), and The Corn Is Green (1945), and she received Academy Award nominations for her performances in the first three films. However, her career began to falter near the end of the decade. She severed her 18-year relationship with Warner Brothers in 1949 and staged the first of several spectacular comebacks with her virtuoso performance as Broadway diva Margot Channing in All About Eve (1950), which netted her another Oscar nod. She also portrayed Elizabeth I a second time in The Virgin Queen (1955). Although she was again written off as washed up in the early 1960s, she revitalized her career with the Grand Guignol classic What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), for which she was again nominated for an Academy Award. In 1977 she became the first woman to receive the American Film Institute Life Achievement Award. Two years later she won an Emmy for her work in the made-for-television movie Strangers: The Story of a Mother and Daughter (1979). She received a Kennedy Center honor in 1987. Davis suffered devastating health problems in her final decade, but she continued working until a year before her death.

Married four times, Davis eloquently conveyed the vicissitudes of stardom in her autobiographies, The Lonely Life (1962) and This ’n’ That (1987). She also provided running commentary for Whitney Stine’s account of her film career, Mother Goddam: The Story of the Career of Bette Davis (1974).

Additional Information

Ruth Elizabeth “Bette” Davis was an American actress of film, television and theatre. Noted for her willingness to play unsympathetic characters, she was highly regarded for her performances in a range of film genres; from contemporary crime melodramas to historical and period films and occasional comedies, though her greatest successes were her roles in romantic dramas.

After appearing in Broadway plays, Davis moved to Hollywood in 1930, but her early films for Universal Studios were unsuccessful. She joined Warner Bros. in 1932 and established her career with several critically acclaimed performances. In 1937, she attempted to free herself from her contract and although she lost a well-publicized legal case, it marked the beginning of the most successful period of her career. Until the late 1940s, she was one of American cinema’s most celebrated leading ladies, known for her forceful and intense style. Davis gained a reputation as a perfectionist who could be highly combative, and her confrontations with studio executives, film directors and costars were often reported. Her forthright manner, clipped vocal style and ubiquitous cigarette contributed to a public persona which has often been imitated and satirized.

Davis was the co-founder of the Hollywood Canteen, and was the first female president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress twice, was the first person to accrue 10 Academy Award nominations for acting, and was the first woman to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Film Institute. Her career went through several periods of eclipse, and she admitted that her success had often been at the expense of her personal relationships. Married four times, she was once widowed and thrice divorced, and raised her children as a single parent. Her final years were marred by a long period of ill health, but she continued acting until shortly before her death from breast cancer, with more than 100 films, television and theater roles to her credit. In 1999, Davis was placed second, after Katharine Hepburn, on the American Film Institute’s list of the greatest female stars of all time.

Ruth Elizabeth Davis, known from early childhood as “Betty”, was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, the daughter of Ruth Augusta and Harlow Morrell Davis, a patent attorney; her sister Barbara was born October 25, 1909. The family was Protestant, of English, French, and Welsh ancestry. In 1915, Davis’s parents separated and Betty and Bobby attended a Spartan boarding school called Crestalban in Lanesborough, which is located in the Berkshires. In 1921, Ruth Davis moved to New York City with her daughters, where she worked as a portrait photographer. Betty was inspired to become an actress after seeing Rudolph Valentino in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and Mary Pickford in Little Lord Fauntleroy, and changed the spelling of her name to “Bette” after Honoré de Balzac’s La Cousine Bette. She received encouragement from her mother, who had aspired to become an actress.

Jai Ganesh · 2023-05-09 20:48:45

1269) Luise Rainer

Summary

Luise Rainer (12 January 1910 – 30 December 2014) was a German-American-British film actress. She was the first thespian to win multiple Academy Awards and the first to win back-to-back; at the time of her death, thirteen days shy of her 105th birthday, she was the longest-lived Oscar recipient, a superlative that has not been exceeded as of 2023.

Rainer started her acting career in Germany at age 16, under the tutelage of Austria's leading stage director, Max Reinhardt. Within a few years, she had become a distinguished Berlin stage actress with Reinhardt's Vienna theater ensemble. Critics highly praised the quality of her acting. After years of acting on stage and in films in Austria and Germany, she was discovered by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer talent scouts, who signed her to a three-year contract in Hollywood in 1935. A number of filmmakers predicted she might become another Greta Garbo, MGM's leading female star at the time.

Her first American film role was in Escapade in 1935. The following year she was given a supporting part in the musical biography The Great Ziegfeld, where, despite limited appearances, her emotion-filled performance so impressed audiences that she was awarded the Academy Award for Best Actress. She was later dubbed the "Viennese teardrop" for her dramatic telephone scene in the film. For her next role, producer Irving Thalberg was convinced, despite the studio's disagreement, that she would also be able to play the part of a poor, plain Chinese farm wife in The Good Earth (1937), based on Pearl Buck's novel about hardship in China. The subdued character role was such a dramatic contrast to her previous vivacious character that she again won the Academy Award for Best Actress. Rainer and Jodie Foster are the only actresses ever to win two Oscars before the age of 30.

However, she later stated nothing worse could have happened to her than winning two consecutive Oscars, as audience expectations from then on would be too high to fulfill. After a string of insignificant roles, MGM and Rainer became disappointed, leading her to end her brief three-year film career, soon returning to Europe. Adding to her rapid decline, some feel, was the poor career advice she received from her then-husband, playwright Clifford Odets, along with the unexpected death at age 37 of her producer, Irving Thalberg, whom she greatly admired. Some film historians consider her the "most extreme case of an Oscar victim in Hollywood mythology".

Details

Luise Rainer, (born January 12, 1910, Düsseldorf, Germany—died December 30, 2014, London, England), German-born film actress was the first person to receive two Academy Awards for acting.

Rainer spent portions of her childhood in Vienna (where some sources say she was born) as well as in Munich and Switzerland. She began acting at the age of 16 and became a distinguished stage actress with Max Reinhardt’s company (from 1927). She appeared in three German-language movies in the early 1930s. A talent scout for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer offered her a contract, and she moved to Hollywood in 1935.

In her first movie for MGM, Rainer starred with William Powell in the romantic comedy Escapade (1935). She next portrayed Anna Held in The Great Ziegfeld (1936), about the impresario Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr. (played by Powell). Her emotional performance in the film—highlighted by a scene in which her character telephones her ex-husband to congratulate him on his new marriage—earned Rainer an Academy Award for best actress. In 1937 she starred as O-Lan, a long-suffering Chinese peasant, in The Good Earth, an adaptation of Pearl S. Buck’s novel. Her moving performance in a role that was nearly the polar opposite of her previous one won her a second consecutive best-actress Oscar. Her subsequent films—the thriller The Emperor’s Candlesticks (1937), the dramas Big City (1937) and The Toy Wife (1938), the musical The Great Waltz (1938), and the show-business movie Dramatic School (1938)—were less successful. Dissatisfied with the way her career was being handled, Rainer publicly fought with MGM head Louis B. Mayer.

After the end of her stormy marriage (1937–40) to Clifford Odets, Rainer made one World War II film for Paramount (Hostages [1943]) and later retired to Europe with her second husband. She made a few stage, screen, and television appearances over the next decades. Her final appearances were in The Gambler (1997), based on a novella by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Poem—Ich setzte den Fuss in die Luft und sie trug (2003; Poem: I Set My Foot Upon the Air and It Carried Me), dramatizations of 19 classic German poems.

Jai Ganesh · 2023-05-11 00:02:40

1270) Marie Dressler

Summary

Marie Dressler (born Leila Marie Koerber, November 9, 1868 – July 28, 1934) was a Canadian stage and screen actress, comedian, and early silent film and Depression-era film star. In 1914, she was in the first full-length film comedy. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1931.

Leaving home at the age of 14, Dressler built a career on stage in traveling theatre troupes, where she learned to appreciate her talent in making people laugh. In 1892, she started a career on Broadway that lasted into the 1920s, performing comedic roles that allowed her to improvise to get laughs. From one of her successful Broadway roles, she played the titular role in the first full-length screen comedy, Tillie's Punctured Romance (1914), opposite Charlie Chaplin and Mabel Normand. She made several shorts, but mostly worked in New York City on stage. During World War I, along with other celebrities, she helped sell Liberty bonds. In 1919, she helped organize the first union for stage chorus players.

Her career declined in the 1920s, and Dressler was reduced to living on her savings while sharing an apartment with a friend. In 1927, she returned to films at the age of 59 and experienced a remarkable string of successes. For her performance in the comedy film Min and Bill (1930), Dressler won the Academy Award for Best Actress. She died of cancer in 1934.

Details

Marie Dressler, original name Leila Marie Koerber, (born Nov. 9, 1868, Cobourg, Ont., Can.—died July 28, 1934, Santa Barbara, Calif., U.S.), was a Canadian-born comedian and singer who achieved her greatest success toward the end of her life.

Dressler was the daughter of a piano teacher and early in life discovered her ability to make audiences laugh. She made her stage debut in Michigan in 1886 and then performed for three years with the George Baker Opera Company. After a long upward climb from stock companies to vaudeville to the chorus line, she first appeared on Broadway in the musical The Robber of the Rhine (1892) and later attained Broadway stardom in the 1896 musical comedy Lady Slavey. Throughout the next decade she shared the stage with such popular performers as Weber and Fields, Anna Held, and Lillian Russell, entertaining audiences with her broad, outrageous physical humour and her superb singing voice.

In 1910 Dressler scored her greatest Broadway hit with Tillie’s Nightmare, which four years later served as the basis of her first motion picture, Tillie’s Punctured Romance (1914). Of historical importance as the first feature-length comedy, this Mack Sennett production hardly showed Dressler at her best by modern standards—her strenuous overacting seemed almost grotesque compared with the subtler performances of costars Charlie Chaplin and Mabel Normand—but in 1914 it was a huge success and spawned several sequels. After this initial burst of movie activity, Dressler returned to the stage, only to put her Broadway career on hold when the United States entered World War I. From 1917 to 1918 she campaigned tirelessly on behalf of Liberty Bonds and gave countless free performances for American servicemen. Returning to New York City after the war, she was virtually unemployable. This reversal in fortune has been attributed to her pro-union activities during the Actors’ Equity strike of 1919, though it is equally likely that her broad style of comedy was then regarded as outmoded.

By the mid-1920s Dressler was broke and her stage career was at a standstill. With the help of some Hollywood contacts, including screenwriter Frances Marion, she landed choice supporting roles in a handful of major silent films, including The Callahans and the Murphys (1927) and The Patsy (1928). By the time talking pictures took hold, she was under contract to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where in 1930 her fortunes rose again when she turned in a solid dramatic performance as waterfront barfly Marthy in Anna Christie. The following year the 62-year-old actress won an Academy Award for her work in Min and Bill. In 1932 she received another Oscar nomination, for Emma, and reteamed with her Min and Bill costar, Wallace Beery, for the popular Tugboat Annie.

Although she occasionally lapsed into the unbridled hamminess of her Broadway heyday—her climactic double-take in Dinner at Eight (1933) is among the funniest scenes ever filmed—Dressler in her later films conveyed a poignant, earthy realism that struck a responsive chord with Depression audiences. She ranked number one in the Motion Picture Herald’s list of top box office attractions in 1932 and 1933 and remained enormously popular until her death.

Additional Information

Once you saw her, you would not forget her. Despite her age and weight, she became one of the top box office draws of the sound era. She was 14 when she joined a theater group and she went on to work on stage and in light opera. By 1892, she was on Broadway and she later became a star comedienne on the vaudeville circuit. In 1910, she had a hit with 'Tillie's Nightmare' which Mack Sennett adapted to film as Tillie's Punctured Romance (1914) with Charles Chaplin. Marie took top billing over a young Chaplin, but her film career never took off and by 1918, she was out of films and out of work. Her role in the chorus girls' strike of 1917 had her blacklisted from the theaters. In 1927, MGM screenwriter Frances Marion got her a small part in The Joy Girl (1927) and then a co-starring lead with Polly Moran in The Callahans and the Murphys (1927) (which was abruptly withdrawn from circulation thanks to objections of Irish-American groups over its depiction of gin-guzzling Irish). Her career stalled and the 59-year old actress found herself no longer in demand. In the late 1920s she had been largely forgotten and reduced to near-poverty. Despite her last film being a financial disaster, Irving Thalberg, somewhat incredibly, sensed her potential was determined to re-build her into a star. It was a slow return in films but her popularity continued to grow. But it was sound that made her a star again. Anna Christie (1930) was the movie where Garbo talks, but everyone noticed Marie as Marthy. In an era of Harlow, Garbo and Crawford, it was homely old Marie Dressler that won the coveted exhibitor's poll as the most popular actress for three consecutive years. In another film from the same year, Min and Bill (1930) she received a best actress Oscar for her dramatic performance. She received another Academy Award nomination for Emma (1932). She had more success with Dinner at Eight (1933) and Tugboat Annie (1933). In 1934, cancer claimed her life.

Jai Ganesh · 2023-05-13 21:41:21

1271) Helen Hayes

Summary

Helen Hayes MacArthur (née Brown; October 10, 1900 – March 17, 1993) was an American actress whose career spanned eighty-two years. She eventually received the nickname "First Lady of American Theatre" and was the second person and first woman to have won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony Award (an EGOT). She was also the first person to win the Triple Crown of Acting; to date, the only other people to have accomplished both are Rita Moreno and Viola Davis. Hayes also received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America's highest civilian honor, from President Ronald Reagan in 1986. In 1988, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts.

The annual Helen Hayes Awards, which have recognized excellence in professional theatre in greater Washington, D.C., since 1984, are her namesake. In 1955, the former Fulton Theatre on 46th Street in New York City's Theatre District was renamed the Helen Hayes Theatre. When that venue was torn down in 1982, the nearby Little Theatre was renamed in her honor. Helen Hayes is regarded as one of the greatest leading ladies of the 20th-century theatre.

Details

Helen Hayes Brown (October 10, 1900 – March 17, 1993) was an American actress. Her career lasted for almost 70 years. Known as the "First Lady of the American Theatre", she is one of only thirteen people to win all four main American entertainment awards - Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony. Hayes also received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1986, the National Medal of Arts in 1988 and was awarded at the Kennedy Center Honors in 1981. Two Broadway theaters are named after her.

Early life

Hayes was born in Washington D.C. on October 10, 1890. She was an only child. Her mother, Catherine Estelle Hayes, was an actress of Irish ancestry. Her father, Francis van Arnum Brown, was a meat salesman.

Hayes was an accomplished child. She went to a dancing school and sang very well. She began a stage career at the age of five, pushed by her mother. She also took her mother's maiden name as her stage name. By the age of ten, she had made a short movie. In 1917 Hayes graduated from the Academy of the Sacred Heart Convent in Washington.

Career

Her first sound movie The Sin of Madelon Claudet (1931) brought her Academy Award for Best Actress. The part she played in it was written by her husband, Charles MacArthur. Among her other successful movies of that time were Arrowsmith (1931), A Farewell to Arms (1932), What Every Woman Knows (1934).

Hayes liked working in theatre. Her most famous performance on Broadway was the role of Queen Victoria in a play Victoria Regina (1938). She played leading parts in Coquette (1928) and Mary Of Scotland (1933) as well. Harvey (1970) became her last hit on stage. Hayes had to retire from theatre because of her asthma condition.

She continued her work in movies. Hayes won her second Academy Award in 1970 for Airport. This time for Supporting role. During the later part of her career she was often in series and movies made for television. She successfully portrayed legendary character Miss Marple in several movies in 80s.

Personal life

Hayes met her husband, Charles MacArthur, a playwright, in 1927. They married in August of 1928. They had a daughter, Mary, born in 1930. She became involved in acting, but died from polio at age 19. In 1938 Hayes and Charles adopted a son, James MacArthur, who grew up to be an actor.

Charles MacArthur died in 1956. He had many years of illness and grief caused by his daughter's untimely death. Hayes never married again.

She published four autobiographies: A Gift of Joy (1965), On Reflection (1968), Twice Over Lightly (1972), and My Life in Three Acts (1990).

Death

Hayes died on March 17, 1993 from heart failure in the hospital of Nyack, New York. She was 92. She was buried in the Oak Hill Cemetery, next to her husband and daughter.

Additional Information

Helen Hayes, original name Helen Hayes Brown, (born Oct. 10, 1900, Washington, D.C., U.S.—died March 17, 1993, Nyack, New York), was an American actress who was widely considered to be the “First Lady of the American Theatre.”

At the behest of her mother, a touring stage performer, Hayes attended dancing class as a youngster, and, from 1905 to 1909, she performed with the Columbia Players. At age nine, she made her Broadway debut as Little Mimi in the Victor Herbert operetta Old Dutch, and in 1910 she was cast in the one-reel Vitagraph film Jean and the Calico Cat. Specializing in standard ingenue roles during her teen years, she attained a degree of popularity in the touring company of Pollyanna (1917) and the New York productions of Penrod and Dear Brutus (both 1918).

Cast as the heroine in the 1920 comedy Bab, she became the youngest actress to have her name in lights on Broadway—an occasion that prompted an enterprising distributor to release the only silent film in which she had starred, The Weavers of Life, which had been sitting on the shelf for three years. Uncomfortable with her sudden ascendancy, she refused to believe she had truly “arrived” until 1926, when she was cast as the multifaceted heroine of James Barrie’s What Every Woman Knows. Two years later she married the journalist and playwright Charles MacArthur, a union that lasted until his death in 1956.

In 1931 Hayes and MacArthur went to Hollywood, where she made her talking picture debut in The Sin of Madelon Claudet, for which she received an Academy Award. Although she made a number of later films, including the 1932 version of A Farewell to Arms, Hayes was unhappy in Hollywood and soon returned to Broadway. In 1933 she scored her biggest stage success to date in Mary of Scotland, surpassing this triumph in 1935 with a tour-de-force performance in Victoria Regina, which ran for three years. Her many subsequent stage credits included Happy Birthday (1946), which earned her the first Tony Award for best actress.

Except for occasional appearances in such films as My Son John (1952) and Anastasia (1956), Hayes remained essentially a stage performer until 1971, when her chronic asthmatic bronchitis triggered an allergic reaction to stage dust. The previous year, she had won a second Academy Award for her portrayal of an elderly stowaway in the movie Airport (1970), which precipitated a succession of similarly eccentric movie roles. Active until the mid-1980s, she divided her time between film and television work, and in 1973 she costarred with Mildred Natwick in the weekly TV series The Snoop Sisters. She ended her acting career as Agatha Christie’s elderly sleuth Miss Marple in three well-received television movies during the early 1980s. Hayes published four autobiographies: A Gift of Joy (1965), On Reflection (1968), Twice Over Lightly (1972, with Anita Loos), and My Life in Three Acts (1991). Her daughter Mary MacArthur also pursued a stage career before her death from polio in 1949, and her son James MacArthur was a successful film and TV actor, known mostly for his role on the television series Hawaii Five-O. Showered with awards and citations for her acting and humanitarian activities, Hayes received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1986 and held the distinction of having two Broadway theatres named in her honour.

Jai Ganesh · 2023-05-15 00:02:19

1272) Claudette Colbert

Summary

Claudette Colbert (born Émilie Claudette Chauchoin; September 13, 1903 – July 30, 1996) was an American actress. Colbert began her career in Broadway productions during the late 1920s and progressed to films with the advent of talking pictures. Initially associated with Paramount Pictures, she gradually shifted to working as an actress free of the studio system. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress for It Happened One Night (1934), and received two other Academy Award nominations during her career. Colbert's other notable films include Cleopatra (1934) and The Palm Beach Story (1942).

With her round face, big eyes, aristocratic manner, and flair for light comedy and emotional drama, Colbert's versatility led to her becoming one of the best-paid stars of the 1930s and 1940s and, in 1938 and 1942, the highest-paid. In all, Colbert starred in more than 60 movies. Among her frequent co-stars were Fred MacMurray, in seven films (1935–1949), and Fredric March, in four films (1930–1933).

By the early 1950s, Colbert had turned from the screen to television and stage work, and she earned a Tony Award nomination for The Marriage-Go-Round in 1959. Her career waned in the early 1960s, however in the late 1970s, it experienced a resurgence in theater. Colbert received a Sarah Siddons Award for her Chicago theater work in 1980. Colbert's television work in The Two Mrs. Grenvilles (1987) earned her a Golden Globe Award and an Emmy Award nomination.

In 1999, the American Film Institute named Colbert the 12th-greatest female star of classic Hollywood cinema.

Details

Claudette Colbert, original name Emilie (Lily) Claudette Chauchoin, (born September 13, 1903, Saint-Mandé, Val-de-Marne, France—died July 30, 1996, Speightstown, Barbados), was an American stage and motion-picture actress known for her trademark bangs, her velvety purring voice, her confident intelligent style, and her subtle graceful acting.

Colbert moved with her family to New York City about 1910. While studying fashion design, she landed a small role in the Broadway play The Wild Westcotts (1923) after meeting the playwright at a party. She had begun using the name Claudette instead of Lily in high school, and for her stage name she added her paternal grandmother’s maiden name, Colbert. Although The Wild Westcotts had only a short run, Colbert enjoyed acting enough to give up thoughts of working as a fashion designer. Other Broadway and touring productions followed, and she achieved theatre stardom in The Barker (1927), playing a carnival snake charmer opposite Norman Foster, to whom she was married from 1928 to 1934. (Her second marriage, to Joel Pressman, lasted from 1935 until his death in 1968.) While still starring in The Barker, Colbert made her film debut in the Frank Capra-directed silent movie For the Love of Mike (1927). Miserable about the acting conventions for silent films and unhappy because she was unable to use one of her greatest assets, her voice, she returned to the stage determined never to make another film. That experience, however, did not prevent her from signing a contract with Paramount Pictures in 1928, and a year later she made her first talking picture, The Hole in the Wall, with Edward G. Robinson in an early gangster role. Colbert did not return to Broadway for more than 25 years.

Most of Colbert’s early movies were undistinguished, although her performances were admired. One of her first memorable roles was in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Sign of the Cross (1932). As Poppaea, the wife of Nero (played campily by Charles Laughton) and “the wickedest woman in the world,” Colbert slinked about in revealing costumes, vamped costar Fredric March, and in one famous scene took a bath in what was said to be donkey's milk. She caused a sensation and two years later reinforced her gender symbol status in DeMille’s flamboyant Cleopatra, playing the title role with tongue-in-cheek charm.

Colbert’s breakthrough came in 1934. That year she not only starred as Cleopatra but had two big successes with the melodrama Imitation of Life, with Louise Beavers, and Capra’s classic screwball comedy It Happened One Night, in which she played opposite Clark Gable. Colbert had been initially reluctant to appear in the slight comedy, but her sparkling performance as a runaway heiress became her most famous and won her an Academy Award. All three films were nominated for best motion picture that year, and It Happened One Night took the award.

One of the highest-paid film stars of the 1930s and ’40s, Colbert continued to demonstrate her expert comic timing in such sophisticated comedies as The Gilded Lily (1935; with Fred MacMurray and Ray Milland), Midnight (1939; with Don Ameche and John Barrymore), and The Palm Beach Story (1942; with Joel McCrea). She also had notable dramatic roles in such films as Private Worlds (1935; with Charles Boyer and McCrea), for which she was nominated for the best actress Academy Award; Since You Went Away (1944), which also won her a nomination for best actress; and Three Came Home (1950), based on the true story of one woman’s experiences in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps during World War II.

The characters Colbert created were relaxed and charming, even when embroiled in outlandish situations; she imbued them, seemingly effortlessly, with intelligence, style, warmth, and humour. The actress was also personally noted for those qualities as well as for her professionalism (despite her much-publicized insistence that she be photographed only from the left).

Colbert, who grew up speaking both French and English, appeared in several European films in the 1950s. But whether domestic or foreign, most of those films were undistinguished. She returned to the stage in 1951 in Westport, Connecticut, with Noël Coward’s Island Fling and to Broadway in 1956 in the romantic comedy Janus. Her other theatrical appearances included The Marriage-Go-Round (1958; 431 performances) and five other, relatively short-lived plays, the last of which, Aren’t We All?, ran for 93 performances in 1985. Colbert continued to act onstage and on television, appearing with Coward and Lauren Bacall in the made-for-television movie Blithe Spirit (1956) and on the television miniseries and her last major project, The Two Mrs. Grenvilles (1987), for which she won a best supporting actress Golden Globe). In 1989 she was honoured with a Kennedy Center award for lifetime achievement.

Additional Information

Claudette Colbert was born in Saint-Mandé, Val-de-Marne, France on September 13, 1903 and was brought to the United States as a child three years later. Born Emilie 'Lily' Claudette Chauchoin, she went to high school in New York. She was studying at the Art Students League when, in 1923, she took the name Claudette Colbert for her first Broadway role in "The Wild Westcotts". Her most noteworthy stage vehicle was the "The Barker" in 1927. Her first film was a silent For the Love of Mike (1927), directed by Frank Capra. Made on a shoestring, the movie was a flop, and she vowed that it would be her last film role: "I only left Broadway when the crash came. The Depression killed the theater, and the pictures were manna from heaven". She had her first film success the next year, however, in The Lady Lies (1929).

Her early notable films were all box-office hits and included Cleopatra (1934), in which she played the title role enticingly. She had her greatest triumph playing a runaway heiress, with enormous charm, opposite Clark Gable in Capra's comedy It Happened One Night (1934), for which she won the Academy Award as Best Actress. By 1938 her keen ability in business made her the highest paid star in Hollywood. By 1950, though, her star had begun to wane. She returned to the stage in 1956 when she replaced Margaret Sullavan during the spring and summer in the comedy "Janus". Appearances in other Broadway productions followed, including "The Marriage-Go-Round". Besides the stage, she did TV specials and had a supporting role in a notable TV movie, The Two Mrs. Grenvilles (1987), for which she received a Golden Globe award. In 1989 she was presented with a Life Achievement award from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

She married actor Norman Foster in 1928, although they never lived together and were divorced after seven years. She married surgeon Dr. Joel Pressman soon after and remained married until his death in 1968. In latter years she divided her time between an apartment in New York and a 200-year-old plantation house in Speightstown, Barbados, where she entertained such guests as Frank Sinatra and Ronald Reagan. She remained on Barbados Island after her stroke. On July 30, 1996, Claudette died in Speightstown, Barbados. She was 92.

Jai Ganesh · 2023-05-16 22:29:22

1273) Ginger Rogers

Summary

Ginger Rogers (born Virginia Katherine McMath; July 16, 1911 – April 25, 1995) was an American actress, dancer and singer during the Golden Age of Hollywood. She won an Academy Award for Best Actress for her starring role in Kitty Foyle (1940), and performed during the 1930s in RKO's musical films with Fred Astaire. Her career continued on stage, radio and television throughout much of the 20th century.

Rogers was born in Independence, Missouri, and raised in Kansas City. She and her family moved to Fort Worth, Texas, when she was nine years old. In 1925, she won a Charleston dance contest that helped her launch a successful vaudeville career. After that, she gained recognition as a Broadway actress for her stage debut in Girl Crazy. This led to a contract with Paramount Pictures, which ended after five films. Rogers had her first successful film roles as a supporting actress in 42nd Street (1933) and Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933).

In the 1930s, Rogers's nine films with Fred Astaire are credited with revolutionizing the genre and gave RKO Pictures some of its biggest successes: The Gay Divorcee (1934), Top Hat (1935) and Swing Time (1936). But after two commercial failures with Astaire, she turned her focus to dramatic and comedy films. Her acting was well received by critics and audiences in films such as Stage Door (1937), Vivacious Lady (1938), Bachelor Mother (1939), Primrose Path (1940), The Major and the Minor (1942) and I'll Be Seeing You (1944). After winning the Oscar, Rogers became one of the biggest box-office draws and highest-paid actresses of the 1940s.

Rogers's popularity was peaking by the end of the decade. She reunited with Astaire in 1949 in the commercially successful The Barkleys of Broadway. She starred in the successful comedy Monkey Business (1952) and was critically lauded for her performance in Tight Spot (1955) before entering an unsuccessful period of filmmaking in the mid-1950s, and returned to Broadway in 1965, playing the lead role in Hello, Dolly! More Broadway roles followed, along with her stage directorial debut in 1985 of an off-Broadway production of Babes in Arms. She continued to act, making television appearances until 1987, and wrote an autobiography Ginger: My Story which was published in 1991. In 1992, Rogers was recognized at the Kennedy Center Honors. She died of natural causes in 1995, at age 83.

During her long career, Rogers made 73 films, and she ranks number 14 on the AFI's 100 Years...100 Stars list of female stars of classic American cinema.

Details

Ginger Rogers, original name Virginia Katherine McMath, (born July 16, 1911, Independence, Missouri, U.S.—died April 25, 1995, Rancho Mirage, California), was an American stage and film dancer and actress who was noted primarily as the partner of Fred Astaire in a series of motion-picture musicals.

McMath was given the nickname Ginger, which was based on a cousin’s failed attempts to pronounce Virginia. Her parents divorced when she was still an infant, and she was raised by her mother, Lela Owens McMath. In 1920 Lela married John Rogers, and Ginger took his last name. She began her career, which was carefully orchestrated by her mother, performing in local shows in Texas while she was still a child. She then appeared with Eddie Foy’s vaudeville troupe before winning a Charleston contest at age 15. That success ultimately led her to the Broadway stage in 1929, when she performed in Top Speed. By the time she was 19 years old, Rogers had introduced George Gershwin’s “Embraceable You” and “But Not for Me” in the 1930 Broadway hit Girl Crazy. She then went to Hollywood and began performing in movies, typecast as a flippant blonde.

Rogers made her motion-picture debut in Young Man of Manhattan (1930), in which she immortalized the catchphrase “Cigarette me, big boy.” Her gum cracking and good-natured wholesomeness typified 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933 (both 1933), while her stately beauty and sophisticated charm fueled the on-screen chemistry with Fred Astaire in their films. Katharine Hepburn notably said, “He gives her class, and she gives him physical relationship.” Rogers first performed with Astaire in Flying Down to Rio (1933), and their dance scenes—featuring an effortlessness and energy that became their trademarks—proved so popular that they continued the partnership in nine other films, notably The Gay Divorcee (1934), Top Hat (1935), Follow the Fleet (1936), The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939), and The Barkleys of Broadway (1949), their last collaboration.

Though best known for her dancing, Rogers preferred dramatic acting, and in 1940 she won an Academy Award for her leading role in Kitty Foyle, in which she portrayed a spirited working girl who ultimately chooses love over money. She also enjoyed a sure hand in light comedy and starred in such films as Tom, Dickinson and Harry (1941) and The Major and the Minor (1942), in which her character pretended to be a 12-year-old girl. Some of her other 70 films include Roxie Hart (1942), Lady in the Dark (1944), and Monkey Business (1952).

After appearing in her last film, Harlow (1965), Rogers maintained a busy theatre schedule, performing the title role in Hello Dolly! from 1965 to 1967 and introducing Mame to London audiences in 1969. In addition, Rogers occasionally appeared on television, with guest roles in such series as Here’s Lucy and The Love Boat. Her last acting role came in a 1987 episode of Hotel.

Rogers was a 1992 recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors for lifetime achievement. In her autobiography, Ginger: My Story (1991), she touched on her five failed marriages and explored her lifestyle as a Christian Scientist.

Jai Ganesh · 2023-05-17 23:04:36

1274) Joan Fontaine

Summary

Joan de Beauvoir de Havilland (October 22, 1917 – December 15, 2013), known professionally as Joan Fontaine, was a British-American actress who is best known for her starring roles in Hollywood films during the "Golden Age". Fontaine appeared in more than 45 films in a career that spanned five decades. She was the younger sister of actress Olivia de Havilland. Their rivalry was well-documented in the media at the height of Fontaine's career.

She began her film career in 1935, signing a contract with RKO Pictures. Fontaine received her first major role in The Man Who Found Himself (1937) and in Gunga Din (1939). Her career prospects improved greatly after her starring role in Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940), for which she received her first of three nominations for the Academy Award for Best Actress. The following year, she won that award for her role in Hitchcock's Suspicion (1941). A third nomination came with The Constant Nymph (1943). She appeared mostly in drama films through the 1940s, including Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), which is now considered a classic. In the next decade, after her role in Ivanhoe (1952), her film career began to decline and she moved into stage, radio and television roles. She appeared in fewer films in the 1960s, which included Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961), and her final film role in The Witches (1966), also known as The Devil's Own.

She released an autobiography, No Bed of Roses, in 1978, and continued to act until 1994. Having won an Academy Award for her role in Suspicion, Fontaine is the only actress to have won an Academy Award for acting in a Hitchcock film. She and her sister remain the only siblings to have won lead-acting Academy Awards.

Details

Joan Fontaine, byname of Joan de Beauvoir de Havilland, (born October 22, 1917, Tokyo, Japan—died December 15, 2013, Carmel, California, U.S.), was an English American actress who was known for her portrayals of troubled beauties.

De Havilland was born in Tokyo, where her English father worked as a patent attorney and language professor; her mother was an actress. In 1919 she and her elder sister, Olivia, moved with their mother to California, briefly staying in San Francisco before settling in Saratoga. Her parents divorced in 1925, and both soon remarried. Her stepfather’s demanding standards of behaviour led to conflicts with the girls. In 1933 Olivia moved out (after he insisted that she drop out of a school play that she had been cast in or leave home), and Joan was sent to stay with her father in Tokyo, where she enrolled in the American School. However, she returned to California a year later.

Both sisters had acted in local stage productions as children, and Olivia had begun to pursue acting professionally, signing with Warner Brothers in 1934. In order to avoid comparisons with her sister, Joan—who had also decided to become an actress—was credited as Joan Burfield for her screen debut, No More Ladies (1935), and as Joan St. John for her 1935 stage debut in Kind Lady. Her parallel ambitions amplified long-simmering hostilities between the siblings and set them up for a lifetime of competition and enmity. In 1936 Joan signed with producer Jesse Lasky, who soon sold the contract to RKO Pictures. From that year, when she appeared in the play Call It a Day, she was credited as Joan Fontaine, having assumed her stepfather’s surname.

In 1937 Fontaine appeared in a string of films, including the track-and-field drama A Million to One, in which she played the love interest of a competitive runner, and the musical A Damsel in Distress. The latter paired her with Fred Astaire, an ill-conceived casting choice that drew attention to her deficiencies as a singer and dancer. However, she proved able to hold her own as an actress opposite Cary Grant and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., in Gunga Din (1939), a drama concerning bandits in colonial India, and opposite Joan Crawford and Norma Shearer in George Cukor’s The Women (1939), a snarky romp featuring infidelity and backstabbing.

Fontaine then starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940), in which she played the beleaguered successor to the idolized first wife of Laurence Olivier’s character, and Suspicion (1941), in which she played a newlywed who begins to suspect her husband (Grant) of murder. She received Academy Award nominations for both roles and won for the latter. Fontaine was nominated again for her role as a young woman besotted with a composer oblivious to her overtures in The Constant Nymph (1943). Fontaine was granted American citizenship in 1943.

Fontaine assumed the title roles in Jane Eyre (1943), with Orson Welles as her Rochester, and in Ivy (1947), in which she played a scheming murderess. In Kiss the Blood Off My Hands (1948) she starred as the romantic interest of a violent war veteran; in Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) she portrayed a woman carrying a torch for a well-known musician; and in Born to Be Bad (1950) she vamped as a social climber masquerading as an ingenue. In Ivanhoe (1952) her character and Elizabeth Taylor’s compete for the affections of the titular Saxon knight. Fontaine appeared as the elder sister of a mental patient in the 1962 adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night and as a terrorized schoolteacher in the horror film The Witches (1966).

Fontaine also appeared in several episodes of the Ronald Reagan-hosted G.E. True Theatre (1956–61) and in Crossings (1986), a television adaptation of a Danielle Steel novel set during World War II. She retired from acting in 1994. Fontaine’s memoir, No Bed of Roses (1978), details her rise to fame and relates some highlights of her feud with Olivia.

Jai Ganesh · 2023-05-19 22:26:30

1275) Greer Garson

Details

Eileen Evelyn Greer Garson (29 September 1904 – 6 April 1996) was a British-American actress and singer. She was a major star at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer who became popular during the Second World War for her portrayal of strong women on the homefront; listed by the Motion Picture Herald as one of America's top-ten box office draws from 1942 to 1946.

The fourth most-nominated woman for the Best Actress Oscar, Garson received seven Academy Award nominations, including a record-tying (with Bette Davis) five consecutive nominations (1941–1945) in the actress category, winning for her performance in the title role of the 1942 film Mrs. Miniver.

Early life

Greer Garson was born on 29 September 1904 in Manor Park, East Ham (then in Essex, now part of Greater London), the only child of Nancy Sophia "Nina" (née Greer; 1880–1958) and George Garson (1865–1906), a commercial clerk in a London importing business. Her father was born in London to Scottish parents, and her mother was born at Drumalore (usually spelled as Drumalure or Drumaloor), a townland near Belturbet in County Cavan, Ireland. The name Greer is a contraction of MacGregor, another family name.

Her maternal grandfather David Greer (c. 1848-1913 from Kilrea, County Londonderry), was an RIC sergeant stationed in Castlewellan, County Down. In the 1870s or 1880s he became a land steward to the wealthy Annesley family, who built the town of Castlewellan. While there, he lived in a large detached house called "Clairemount", which was built on the lower part of what was known as Pig Street, or locally known as the Back Way, near Shilliday's builder's yard. It was often erroneously reported Greer Garson was born there (The Macmillan International Film Encyclopedia gives her place of birth as County Down, and year of birth as 1908).

Garson read French and 18th-century literature at King's College London and did her postgraduate studies at the University of Grenoble. While aspiring to be an actress, she was appointed head of the research library of LINTAS in the marketing department of Lever Brothers. Her co-worker there, George Sanders, wrote in his autobiography that it was Garson who suggested he take up a career in acting.

Career

Garson's early professional appearances were on stage, starting at Birmingham Repertory Theatre in January 1932, when she was 27 years old. She appeared on television during its earliest years (the late 1930s), most notably starring in a 30-minute production of an excerpt of Twelfth Night in May 1937, with Dorothy Black. These live transmissions were part of the BBC's experimental service from Alexandra Palace, and this is the first known instance of a Shakespeare play performed on television. In 1936, she appeared in the West End in Charles Bennett's play Page From a Diary, and Noël Coward's play Mademoiselle.

Louis B. Mayer discovered Garson while he was in London looking for new talent. Garson was signed to a contract with MGM in late 1937. The actress suffered a back injury during her first 18 months at MGM while waiting for a role Mayer deemed worthy of her, and was nearly released from her contract.

She began work on her first film, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, in late 1938. She received her first Oscar nomination for the role, but lost to Vivien Leigh for Gone with the Wind. She received critical acclaim the next year for her role as Elizabeth Bennet in the 1940 film Pride and Prejudice.

Garson starred with Joan Crawford in When Ladies Meet, a 1941 poorly received and sanitized re-make of a pre-Code 1933 film of the same name, which had starred Ann Harding and Myrna Loy. That same year, she became a major box-office star with the sentimental Technicolor drama Blossoms in the Dust, which brought her the first of five consecutive Best Actress Oscar nominations, tying Bette Davis's 1938–1942 record, which still stands.

Garson starred in two Academy Award-nominated films in 1942, Mrs. Miniver and Random Harvest. She won the Academy for Best Actress for her performance as a strong British wife and mother protecting the homefront during the Second World War in Mrs. Miniver, which co-starred Walter Pidgeon. The Guinness Book of World Records credits her with the longest Oscar acceptance speech, at five minutes and 30 seconds, after which the Academy Awards instituted a time limit.

In Random Harvest, she co-starred with Ronald Colman. The drama received seven Academy Award nominations, including Colman for Best Actor and Best Picture, but Garson was ineligible, as she had already been nominated that year for Mrs. Miniver. The American Film Institute ranked it #36 on its list of 100 Greatest Love Stories of All Time, and it was one of Garson's favorite films.

Garson also received Oscar nominations for her performances in the films Madame Curie (1943), Mrs. Parkington (1944), and The Valley of Decision (1945). She frequently co-starred with Walter Pidgeon, ultimately making eight pictures with him: Blossoms in the Dust (1941), Mrs. Miniver (1942), Madame Curie, Mrs. Parkington, Julia Misbehaves (1948), That Forsyte Woman (1949), The Miniver Story (1950), and Scandal at Scourie (1953).

Garson was partnered with Clark Gable after his return from war service in Adventure (1945). The film was advertised with the catch-phrase "Gable's back, and Garson's got him!" Gable argued for "He put the Arson in Garson"; she countered with "She put the Able in Gable!"; thereafter, the safer catchphrase was selected.

She injured her back again while filming Desire Me in Monterey on 26 April 1946 when a wave knocked her and co-star Richard Hart from the rocks where they were rehearsing. A local fisherman and a film extra rescued Garson from the surf and potential undertow. She was bruised and in shock and required by doctors to rest for several days. The injury to her back would require several surgeries over the coming years.

Garson's popularity declined somewhat in the late 1940s, but she remained a prominent film star until the mid-1950s. In 1951, she became a naturalised citizen of the United States. She made only a few films after her MGM contract expired in 1954. In 1958, she received a warm reception on Broadway in Auntie Mame, replacing Rosalind Russell, who had gone to Hollywood to make the film version. In 1960, Garson received her seventh and final Oscar nomination for Sunrise at Campobello, playing Eleanor Roosevelt, this time losing to Elizabeth Taylor for BUtterfield 8.

Greer was a special guest on an episode of the TV series Father Knows Best, playing herself. On 4 October 1956, Garson appeared with Reginald Gardiner as the first two guest stars of the series in the premiere of NBC's The Ford Show, Starring Tennessee Ernie Ford. She appeared as a mystery guest on What's My Line on 25 October 1953 and again on 6 April 1958 to promote her appearance on stage in Auntie Mame. She also served as a panelist rather than a guest on the What's My Line episode which aired on 12 May 1957.

She returned to MGM for a role in The Singing Nun (1966), starring Debbie Reynolds. Her last film appearance was in the 1967 Walt Disney feature The Happiest Millionaire, although she made infrequent television appearances afterwards. In 1968, she narrated the children's television special The Little Drummer Boy. Her final role for television was in a 1982 episode of The Love Boat.

Additional Information

Greer Garson, in full Eileen Evelyn Greer Garson, (born September 29, 1904, Manor Park, London, Eng.—died April 6, 1996, Dallas, Texas, U.S.), was a motion-picture actress whose classic beauty and screen persona of elegance, poise, and maternal virtue made her one of the most popular and admired Hollywood stars of the World War II era.

Garson often claimed to have been born in County Down, Ireland, where her grandparents lived and which she happily visited as a child, but she was, in fact, born and raised in London. Although she would have liked to have studied acting, Garson won a scholarship to the University of London and her practical-minded family encouraged her to pursue a teaching career. After graduating with honours, Garson worked briefly for Encyclopædia Britannica and a London advertising firm but continually tried to get her foot into a backstage door. In 1932 she made her debut with the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, playing a middle-aged schoolteacher in Elmer Rice’s Street Scene. Later that year she toured in George Bernard Shaw’s Too True to Be Good, billing herself as Greer (a maternal family name) for the first time. Garson soon established herself as a popular ingenue and leading lady in London’s West End. In 1938 Louis B. Mayer, head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), caught her performance in Old Music and signed her to a contract with his studio.

After suffering through a discouraging first year in Hollywood, Garson returned to England to film the small role of Mrs. Chips in MGM’s Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939). Her portrayal of the beloved schoolteacher’s charming wife endeared her to the American public and set her career in motion. It was the first in a series of roles in which Garson would play women of great loyalty, refinement, and wifely or motherly strength. Garson’s other significant films of the period include Pride and Prejudice (1940), Blossoms in the Dust (1941, the first time she was teamed with her frequent costar Walter Pidgeon), Random Harvest (1942), and Madame Curie (1943), but the film that cemented her reputation and image was Mrs. Miniver (1942). Filmed during World War II and tailor-made for the times, Mrs. Miniver extolled the strength and spirit of the British home front and was one of the year’s biggest hits. Garson’s grace-under-pressure portrayal of a courageous wife and mother, the personification of British fortitude, not only won her an Academy Award but was credited with bolstering American support for the war.

Following the war Garson’s career faltered. The public rejected her attempts to reforge her image to that of a more fun-loving, less noble heroine in such films as Adventure (1946) and Julia Misbehaves (1948). During the 1950s she appeared in several unexceptional films and television dramas and starred on Broadway as Auntie Mame. Her remarkably convincing portrayal of Eleanor Roosevelt in Sunrise at Campobello (1960) was widely praised and earned her a seventh Oscar nomination, but Garson performed only occasionally thereafter, devoting most of her time to philanthropic causes, including the endowment of scholarships for theatre students at Southern Methodist University in Dallas and the construction of a campus theatre.

Jai Ganesh · 2023-05-21 22:04:47

1276) Jennifer Jones

Summary

Jennifer Jones (born Phylis Lee Isley; March 2, 1919 – December 17, 2009), also known as Jennifer Jones Simon, was an American actress and mental health advocate. Over the course of her career that spanned over five decades, she was nominated for the Oscar five times, including one win for Best Actress, as well as a Golden Globe Award win for Best Actress in a Drama.

A native of Tulsa, Oklahoma, Jones worked as a model in her youth before transitioning to acting, appearing in two serial films in 1939. Her third role was a lead part as Bernadette Soubirous in The Song of Bernadette (1943), which earned her the Academy Award and Golden Globe for Best Actress. She went on to star in several films that garnered her significant critical acclaim and a further three Academy Award nominations in the mid-1940s, including Since You Went Away (1944), Love Letters (1945), and Duel in the Sun (1946).

In 1949, Jones married film producer David O. Selznick, and appeared as the eponymous Madame Bovary in Vincente Minnelli's 1949 adaptation. She appeared in several films throughout the 1950s, including Ruby Gentry (1952), John Huston's adventure comedy Beat the Devil (1953), and Vittorio De Sica's drama Terminal Station (also 1953). Jones earned her fifth Academy Award nomination for her performance as a Eurasian doctor in Love is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955).

After Selznick's death in 1965, Jones married industrialist Norton Simon and went into semi-retirement. She made her final film appearance in The Towering Inferno (1974).

Jones suffered from mental health problems during her life and survived a 1967 attempt to killing herself in which she jumped from a cliff in Malibu Beach. After her daughter took her own life in 1976, Jones became profoundly interested in mental health education. In 1980, she founded the Jennifer Jones Simon Foundation for Mental Health and Education. Jones enjoyed a quiet retirement, living for the last six years of her life in Malibu, California where she died of natural causes in 2009, aged 90.

Biography

1919–1939: Early life

Jones was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the daughter of Flora Mae (née Suber) and Phillip Ross Isley. Her father was originally from Georgia, while her mother was a native of Sacramento, California. An only child, she was raised Roman Catholic. Her parents, both aspiring stage actors, toured the Midwest in a traveling tent show they owned and operated. Jones accompanied them, performing on occasion as part of the Isley Stock Company.

In 1925, Jones enrolled at Edgemere Public School in Oklahoma City, then attended Monte Cassino, a Catholic girls school and junior college in Tulsa. After graduating, she enrolled as a drama major at Northwestern University in Illinois, where she was a member of Kappa Alpha Theta sorority before transferring to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City in September, 1937. It was there that she met and fell in love with fellow acting student Robert Walker, a native of Ogden, Utah. They married on January 2, 1939.

Jones and Walker returned to Tulsa for a 13-week radio program arranged by her father, then made their way to Hollywood. She landed two small roles, first in the 1939 John Wayne Western New Frontier, which she filmed in the summer of 1939 for Republic Pictures. Her second project was the serial titled Dickinson Tracy's G-Men (1939), also for Republic. In both films, she was credited as Phylis Isley. After failing a screen test for Paramount Pictures, she became disenchanted with Hollywood and decided to return to New York City.

1940–1948: Career beginnings

Shortly after Jones married Walker, she gave birth to two sons: Robert Walker Jr. (1940–2019), and Michael Walker (1941–2007). While Walker found steady work in radio programs, Jones worked part-time modeling hats for the Powers Agency, and posing for Harper's Bazaar while looking for acting jobs. When she learned of auditions for the lead role in Rose Franken's hit play Claudia in the summer of 1941, she presented herself to David O. Selznick's New York office but fled in tears after what she thought was a bad reading. However, Selznick had overheard her audition and was impressed enough to have his secretary call her back. Following an interview, she was signed to a seven-year contract.

She was carefully groomed for stardom and given a new name: Jennifer Jones. Director Henry King was impressed by her screen test as Bernadette Soubirous for The Song of Bernadette (1943) and she won the coveted role over hundreds of applicants. In 1944, on her 25th birthday, she won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance as Bernadette, her third screen role.

Simultaneous to her rise to prominence for The Song of Bernadette, Jones began an affair with producer Selznick. She separated from Walker in November 1943, co-starred with him in Since You Went Away (1944), and formally divorced him in June 1945. For her performance in Since You Went Away, she was nominated for her second Academy Award, this time for Best Supporting Actress. She earned a third successive Academy Award nomination for her performance opposite Joseph Cotten in the film noir Love Letters (1945).

Jones's dark beauty and initial saintly image (from her first starring role) was a stark contrast three years later when she was cast as a provocative biracial woman in Selznick's controversial Western Duel in the Sun (1946), where she portrayed a Mestiza orphan in Texas who falls in love with an Anglo man (played by Gregory Peck). That year, she starred as the title character in Ernst Lubitsch's romantic comedy Cluny Brown, as a working-class English woman who falls in love just prior to World War II. In 1947, she filmed Portrait of Jennie, a fantasy film released in 1948, based on the novella of the same name by Robert Nathan. It reunited her with co-star Cotten, who portrayed a painter who becomes obsessed with her character, the titular Jennie. It was a commercial failure, grossing only $1.5 million against a $4 million budget.

1949–1964: Marriage to Selznick

Jones married Selznick at sea on July 13, 1949, en route to Europe, after having carried on a relationship for five years. Over the following two decades, she appeared in numerous films he produced, and they established a working relationship. The year they married, Jones starred opposite John Garfield in John Huston's adventure film We Were Strangers. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times felt that Jones's performance was lacking, noting: "There is neither understanding nor passion in the stiff, frigid creature she achieves." She was subsequently cast as the title character of Vincente Minnelli's Madame Bovary (1949), a role originally intended for Lana Turner, which Turner declined. Variety deemed the film "interesting to watch, but hard to feel," though it was noted that "Jones answers to every demand of direction and script." In 1950, Jones starred in the Powell and Pressburger-directed fantasy Gone to Earth as a superstitious gypsy woman in the English countryside.

Jones next starred in William Wyler's drama Carrie (1952), opposite Laurence Olivier. Crowther of The New York Times was unenthused by her performance, writing: "Mr. Olivier gives the film its closest contact with the book, while Miss Jones' soft, seraphic portrait of Carrie takes it furthest away." Also in 1952, she co-starred with Charlton Heston in Ruby Gentry, playing a femme fatale in rural North Carolina who becomes embroiled in a murder conspiracy after marrying a local man. The role was previously offered to Joan Fontaine, who felt she was "unsuited to play backwoods". In their review, Variety deemed the film a "sordid drama with neither Jennifer Jones nor Charlton Heston gaining any sympathy in their characters".

In 1953, Jones was cast opposite Montgomery Clift in Italian director Vittorio De Sica's Terminal Station (Italian: Stazione Termini), a Rome-set drama concerning a romance between an American woman and an Italian man. The film, produced by Selznick, had a troubled production history, with Selznick and De Sica disputing over the screenplay and tone of the film. Aside from the tensions between cast and crew, Jones herself was mourning the recent death of her first husband, Robert Walker, and also missed her two sons, who were staying in Switzerland during production. Terminal Station was screened at the 1953 Cannes Film Festival, and subsequently released in a heavily truncated form in the United States, bearing the title Indiscretion of an American Wife. Also in 1953, Jones re-teamed with director John Huston to star in his film Beat the Devil (1953), an adventure comedy co-starring Humphrey Bogart. The film was a box-office flop and was critically panned upon release, leading even Bogart to distance himself from it. However, it would undergo reevaluation in later years from such critics as Roger Ebert, who included it in his list of "Great Movies" and cited it as the first "camp" film. In August 1954, Jones gave birth to her third child, daughter Mary Jennifer Selznick.

Jones was subsequently cast as Eurasian doctor Han Suyin in the drama Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955), a role that earned her her fifth Academy Award nomination. Crowther of The New York Times lauded her performance as "lovely and intense. Her dark beauty reflects sunshine and sadness." Next, she starred as a schoolteacher in Good Morning, Miss Dove (1955), opposite Robert Stack, followed by a lead role opposite Gregory Peck in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, a drama about a World War II veteran.

In 1957, she starred as the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the historical drama The Barretts of Wimpole Street, based on the 1930 play by Rudolf Besier. She followed this with a lead in the Ernest Hemingway adaptation A Farewell to Arms (1957), opposite Rock Hudson. The film received mixed reviews, with Variety noting that "the relationship between Rock Hudson and Jennifer Jones never takes on real dimensions." Jones's next project, another literary adaptation (this time of F. Scott Fitzgerald), came five years later in 1962's Tender Is the Night, in which she portrayed the emotionally troubled Nicole Diver, who observes her husband's falling in love with another woman while in the south of France.

Jones was a registered Republican who supported Dwight Eisenhower's campaign in the 1952 presidential election and was of the Catholic faith.

1965–2009: Later life and activities

Selznick died at age 63 on June 22, 1965, and after his death, Jones semi-retired from acting. Her first role in four years was a lead part in the British drama The Idol (1966), as the mother of an adult son in the Swinging Sixties London, who has an affair with his best friend.

In 1966, Jones made a rare theatrical appearance in the revival of Clifford Odets' The Country Girl, co-starring Rip Torn, at New York's City Center. On November 9, 1967, the same day her close friend, Charles Bickford died of a blood infection, Jones attempted ending her life. Informing her physician of her intention to jump from a cliff overlooking Malibu Beach, she swallowed barbiturates before walking to the base of the cliff, where she was found unconscious amidst the rocky surf. According to biographer Paul Green, it was news of Bickford's death that triggered Jones's ending her life attempt. She was hospitalized in a coma from the incident before eventually recovering. She returned to film with Angel, Angel, Down We Go in 1969, about a teenage girl who uses her association with a rock band to manipulate her family.

On May 29, 1971, Jones married her third husband, Norton Simon, a multi-millionaire industrialist, art collector and philanthropist from Portland, Oregon. The wedding took place aboard a tugboat five miles off the English coast and was conducted by Unitarian minister Eirion Phillips. Years before, Simon had attempted to buy the portrait of her that was used in the film Portrait of Jennie; Simon later met Jones at a party hosted by fellow industrialist and art collector Walter Annenberg. Her last big-screen appearance came in the smash-hit disaster film The Towering Inferno (1974), which concerned the burning of a San Francisco skyscraper. Her performance as a doomed guest in the building earned her a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Early scenes in the film showed paintings lent to the production by the art gallery of Jones' husband Simon.

Two years later, on May 11, 1976, Jones' 21-year-old daughter, Mary—then a student at Occidental College—died by killing herself by jumping from the roof of a 22-floor apartment hotel in downtown Los Angeles. This led to Jones' subsequent interest in mental health issues. In 1979, with husband Simon (whose own son, Robert, died by killing himself in 1969), she founded the Jennifer Jones Simon Foundation For Mental Health and Education, which she ran until 2003. One of Jones's primary goals with the Foundation was to de-stigmatize mental illness. "I cringe when I admit I've attempting myself, had mental problems, but why should I?" Jones said in 1980. "I hope we can reeducate the world to see there's no more need for stigma in mental illness than there is for cancer." At the time, she also divulged that she had been a patient of psychotherapy since age 24.

Jones spent the remainder of her life outside of the public eye. Four years before the death of her husband Simon in June 1993, he resigned as President of Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena and Jennifer Jones Simon was appointed chairman of the Board of Trustees, President and Executive Officer. In 1996, she began working with architect Frank Gehry and landscape designer Nancy Goslee Power on renovating the museum and gardens. She remained active as the director of the Norton Simon Museum until 2003, when she was given emerita status.

Death

Jones enjoyed a quiet retirement, living with her eldest child, son Robert Walker Jr., and his family in Malibu for the last six years of her life. Jones's younger son, actor Michael Ross Walker, died from cardiac arrest on December 23, 2007, at age 66.

Jones participated in Gregory Peck's AFI Life Achievement Award ceremony in 1989 and appeared at the 70th (1998) and 75th (2003) Academy Awards as part of the shows' tributes to past Oscar winners. In the last six years of her life, she granted no interviews and rarely appeared in public. She died of natural causes on December 17, 2009, at age 90. She was cremated and her ashes were interred with her second husband in the Selznick private room at the Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.

Minor planet 6249 Jennifer is named in her honor.

Public image

Jones suffered from shyness for much of her life and avoided discussing her past and personal life with journalists. She was also averse to discussing critical analysis of her work. Public discussion of her working relationship with her husband, David O. Selznick, often overshadowed her career. Biographer Paul Green contends that, while Selznick helped facilitate her career and sought roles for her, "Jones excelled because she not only possessed outstanding beauty but she also possessed genuine talent."

Jai Ganesh · 2023-05-23 00:17:33

1277). Ingrid Bergman

Summary

Ingrid Bergman[a] (29 August 1915 – 29 August 1982) was a Swedish actress who starred in a variety of European and American films, television movies, and plays. With a career spanning five decades, she is often regarded as one of the most influential screen figures in cinematic history. She won numerous accolades, including three Academy Awards, two Primetime Emmy Awards, a Tony Award, four Golden Globe Awards, BAFTA Award and a Volpi Cup. She is one of only four actresses to have received at least three acting Academy Awards (only Katharine Hepburn has four). In 1999, the American Film Institute recognised Bergman as the fourth greatest female screen legend of Classic Hollywood Cinema.

Born in Stockholm to a Swedish father and a German mother, Bergman began her acting career in Swedish and German films. Her introduction to the U.S. audience came in the English-language remake of Intermezzo (1939). Known for her naturally luminous beauty, she starred in Casablanca (1942) as Ilsa Lund. Bergman's notable performances in the 1940s include the dramas For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), Gaslight (1944), The Bells of St. Mary's (1945), and Joan of Arc (1948), all of which earned her nominations for the Academy Award for Best Actress; she won for Gaslight. She made three films with Alfred Hitchcock: Spellbound (1945), Notorious (1946), and Under Capricorn (1949).

In 1950, she starred in Roberto Rossellini's Stromboli, released after the revelation that she was having an affair with Rossellini; that and her pregnancy prior to their marriage created a scandal in the U.S. that prompted her to remain in Europe for several years. During this time she starred in Rossellini's Europa '51 and Journey to Italy (1954), the former of which won her the Volpi Cup for Best Actress. She returned to Hollywood earning two more Academy Awards for her roles in Anastasia (1956), and Murder on the Orient Express (1974). During this period she also starred in Indiscreet (1958), Cactus Flower (1969), and Autumn Sonata (1978) receiving her sixth Best Actress nomination.

Bergman won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for the Maxwell Anderson play Joan of Lorraine (1947). She also won two Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series or Movie for The Turn of the Screw (1960), and A Woman Called Golda (1982). In 1974, Bergman discovered she was suffering from breast cancer but continued to work until shortly before her death on her sixty-seventh birthday in 1982. Bergman spoke five languages – Swedish, English, German, Italian and French – and acted in each.

Details

Ingrid Bergman, (born August 29, 1915, Stockholm, Sweden—died August 29, 1982, London, England), was a Swedish actress whose natural charm, freshness, intelligence, and vitality made her the image of sincerity and idealized womanhood. One of cinema’s biggest stars, she appeared in such classics as Casablanca (1942) and Notorious (1946).

Early life

Bergman was only two years old when her mother died, and about a decade later her father also passed away. Although she was shy, she long dreamed of becoming an actress, and she worked assiduously for admission to the Royal Dramatic Theatre School in Stockholm, where she studied for a year. Her first credited film appearance was in Munkbrogreven (1935; The Count of the Old Monk’s Bridge), and it was followed by challenging roles in such Swedish films as the original Intermezzo (1936) and En kvinnas ansikte (1938; A Woman’s Face). In 1939 she starred in the Hollywood version of Intermezzo, which was a box-office hit.

Several films later Bergman became a star with Casablanca (1942), one of cinema’s most iconic films. In this romantic drama, Bergman played Ilsa Lund, a woman torn between two men (played by Humphrey Bogart and Paul Henreid) during World War II. Now highly sought after, Bergman appeared in a series of critical and commercial successes that included For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), which was based on Ernest Hemingway’s novel, and the film noir Gaslight (1944). In the latter movie she starred as a woman whose husband (Charles Boyer) attempts to drive her mad, and her performance earned her an Academy Award for best actress.

Bergman received another Oscar nod for her portrayal of a nun in The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945). During this time she also earned acclaim for two thrillers directed by Alfred Hitchcock: Spellbound (1945), in which she played a psychiatrist attempting to help an amnesiac patient (Gregory Peck), and Notorious (1946), an espionage drama that costarred Cary Grant. Bergman continued to show her impressive range by playing the titular character in Joan of Arc (1948), for which she received her fourth Academy Award nomination.

Scandal and later films

During the filming of Stromboli (1950), Bergman began a love affair with the Italian director Roberto Rossellini, and they had a son before she obtained a divorce from her first husband. A scandal ensued—a U.S. senator notably called her “a horrible example of womanhood and a powerful influence for evil”—and Bergman was banned in Hollywood. She returned to Europe, where she appeared in Italian and French films such as Europa ’51 (1952; The Greatest Love) and Viaggio in Italia (1954; Journey to Italy). During this time she married (1950–57) Rossellini, and the couple had two more children, including Isabella Rossellini, who became a noted model and actress.

Bergman made a triumphant Hollywood comeback in Anastasia (1956), for which she won her second Academy Award. She continued to appear in Hollywood productions, including The Inn of the Sixth Happiness (1958), as well as in European films. She won her third Oscar, for best supporting actress, for her role in the highly successful film Murder on the Orient Express (1974). However, most agree that her greatest performance in her later years was as a concert pianist in the Swedish film Höstsonaten (1978; Autumn Sonata), directed by Ingmar Bergman; she received her seventh and final Academy Award nomination for the drama. Her last role was that of Golda Meir, the Israeli prime minister, in the television play A Woman Called Golda (1981). For this role she was posthumously awarded an Emmy Award in 1982.

Stage work

In addition to her film work, Bergman also acted on the stage. In 1940 she made her Broadway debut in Liliom. She later appeared in such critically acclaimed plays as Hedda Gabler (Paris, 1962), A Month in the Country (Great Britain, 1965), and Captain Brassbound’s Conversion (London, 1971). She won a Tony Award for her performance in Joan of Lorraine (1946–47), and her last Broadway appearance was in The Constant Wife (1975). She also starred in the television plays The Turn of the Screw (1959) and Hedda Gabler (1963).

My Story (1980) is her autobiography with alternating sections by Alan Burgess.

Additional Information

Ingrid Bergman was one of the greatest actresses from Hollywood's lamented Golden Era. Her natural and unpretentious beauty and her immense acting talent made her one of the most celebrated figures in the history of American cinema. Bergman is also one of the most Oscar-awarded actresses, tied with Meryl Streep and Frances McDormand, all three of them second only to Katharine Hepburn.

Ingrid Bergman was born on August 29, 1915 in Stockholm, Sweden, to a German mother, Frieda Henrietta (Adler), and a Swedish father, Justus Samuel Bergman, an artist and photographer. Her mother died when she was only two and her father died when she was 12. She went to live with an elderly uncle.

The woman who would be one of the top stars in Hollywood in the 1940s had decided to become an actress after finishing her formal schooling. She had had a taste of acting at age 17 when she played an uncredited role of a girl standing in line in the Swedish film Landskamp (1932) in 1932 - not much of a beginning for a girl who would be known as "Sweden's illustrious gift to Hollywood." Her parents died when she was just a girl and the uncle she lived with didn't want to stand in the way of Ingrid's dream. The next year she enrolled at the Royal Dramatic Theatre School in Stockholm but decided that stage acting was not for her. It would be three more years before she would have another chance at a film. When she did, it was more than just a bit part. The film in question was The Count of the Old Town (1935), where she had a speaking part as Elsa Edlund. After several films that year that established her as a class actress, Ingrid appeared in Intermezzo (1936) as Anita Hoffman. Luckily for her, American producer David O. Selznick saw it and sent a representative from Selznick International Pictures to gain rights to the story and have Ingrid signed to a contract. Once signed, she came to California and starred in United Artists' 1939 remake of her 1936 film, Intermezzo (1939), reprising her original role. The film was a hit and so was Ingrid.

Her beauty was unlike anything the movie industry had seen before and her acting was superb. Hollywood was about to find out that they had the most versatile actress the industry had ever seen. Here was a woman who truly cared about the craft she represented. The public fell in love with her. Ingrid was under contract to go back to Sweden to film Only One Night (1939) in 1939 and June Night (1940) in 1940. Back in the US she appeared in three films, all well-received. She made only one film in 1942, but it was the classic Casablanca (1942) opposite Humphrey Bogart.

Ingrid was choosing her roles well. In 1943 she was nominated for an Academy Award for her role in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), the only film she made that year. The critics and public didn't forget her when she made Gaslight (1944) the following year--her role of Paula Alquist got her the Oscar for Best Actress. In 1945 Ingrid played in Spellbound (1945), Saratoga Trunk (1945) and The Bells of St. Mary's (1945), for which she received her third Oscar nomination for her role of Sister Benedict. She made no films in 1947, but bounced back with a fourth nomination for Joan of Arc (1948). In 1949 she went to Italy to film Stromboli (1950), directed by Roberto Rossellini. She fell in love with him and left her husband, Dr. Peter Lindstrom, and daughter, Pia Lindström. America's "moral guardians" in the press and the pulpits were outraged. She was pregnant and decided to remain in Italy, where her son was born. In 1952 Ingrid had twins, Isotta and Isabella Rossellini, who became an outstanding actress in her own right, as did Pia.

Ingrid continued to make films in Italy and finally returned to Hollywood in 1956 in the title role in Anastasia (1956), which was filmed in England. For this she won her second Academy Award. She had scarcely missed a beat. Ingrid continued to bounce between Europe and the US making movies, and fine ones at that. A film with Ingrid Bergman was sure to be a quality production. In her final big-screen performance in 1978's Autumn Sonata (1978) she had her final Academy Award nomination. Though she didn't win, many felt it was the most sterling performance of her career. Ingrid retired, but not before she gave an outstanding performance in the mini-series A Woman Called Golda (1982), a film about Israeli prime minister Golda Meir. For this she won an Emmy Award as Best Actress, but, unfortunately, she did not live to see the fruits of her labor.

Ingrid died from cancer on August 29, 1982, her 67th birthday, in London, England.

Jai Ganesh · 2023-05-25 00:05:33

1278) Joan Crawford

Summary

Joan Crawford (born Lucille Fay LeSueur; March 23, 190? – May 10, 1977) was an American actress. She started her career as a dancer in traveling theatrical companies before debuting on Broadway. Crawford was signed to a motion picture contract by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1925. Initially frustrated by the size and quality of her parts, Crawford launched a publicity campaign and built an image as a nationally known flapper by the end of the 1920s. By the 1930s, Crawford's fame rivaled MGM colleagues Norma Shearer and Greta Garbo. Crawford often played hardworking young women who find romance and financial success. These "rags-to-riches" stories were well received by Depression-era audiences and were popular with women. Crawford became one of Hollywood's most prominent movie stars and one of the highest paid women in the United States, but her films began losing money. By the end of the 1930s, she was labeled "box office poison".

After an absence of nearly two years from the screen, Crawford staged a comeback by starring in Mildred Pierce (1945), for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress. In 1955, she became involved with the Pepsi-Cola Company, through her marriage to company president Alfred Steele. After his death in 1959, Crawford was elected to fill his vacancy on the board of directors but was forcibly retired in 1973. She continued acting in film and television regularly through the 1960s, when her performances became fewer; after the release of the horror film Trog in 1970, Crawford retired from the screen. Following a public appearance in 1974, after which unflattering photographs were published, Crawford withdrew from public life. She became more and more reclusive until her death in 1977.

Crawford married four times. Her first three marriages ended in divorce; the last ended with the death of husband Al Steele. She adopted five children, one of whom was reclaimed by his birth mother. Crawford's relationships with her two older children, Christina and Christopher, were acrimonious. Crawford disinherited the two and, after Crawford's death, Christina published the "tell-all" memoir Mommie Dearest.

Details

Joan Crawford, original name Lucille Fay LeSueur, (born March 23, 1904?, San Antonio, Texas, U.S.—died May 10, 1977, New York, New York), was a American motion-picture actress who made her initial impact as a vivacious Jazz Age flapper but later matured into a star of psychological melodramas. She developed a glamorous screen image, appearing often as a sumptuously gowned, fur-draped, successful career woman.

Crawford danced in nightclubs under the name Billie Cassin, and by 1924 she was dancing in Broadway musicals. On the screen from 1925, she danced her way through such popular films as Our Dancing Daughters (1928), Dance, Fools, Dance (1931), and Dancing Lady (1933). Among her early successes as a dramatic actress were The Women (1939), Susan and God (1940), Strange Cargo (1940), and A Woman’s Face (1941).

A major turning point in Crawford’s career was her performance in Mildred Pierce (1945), for which she won an Academy Award. The story of an emotional and ambitious woman who rises from waitress to owner of a restaurant chain, it was followed by such high-quality pictures as Humoresque (1947), Sudden Fear (1952), and The Story of Esther Costello (1957). Later successful roles were in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) and The Caretakers (1963).

Crawford was married to the actors Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. (1929–33), Franchot Tone (1935–39), and Phillip Terry (1942–46) and to Alfred Steele (1955–59), chairman of the Pepsi-Cola Company. After his death in 1959 she became a director of the company and in that role hired her friend Dorothy Arzner to film several Pepsi commercials. Crawford’s adopted daughter Christina published Mommie Dearest (1978), an account of the harsh childhood that Christina and an adopted brother had at their mother’s hands, and a film version was produced in 1981.

Additional Information

Biography
Born Lucille Fay LeSueur in San Antonio, Texas, but christened Joan Crawford by Hollywood, she exemplified the 1920s carefree "flapper" era to a 'T'. Her beauty and vivacity catapulted her to stardom in the late 1920s in the hugely popular silent film Our Dancing Daughters. Ever since that point, the resilient actress with the ever expressive eyes, the famous over-painted lips and the will of steel created for herself one of the most legendary and enduring Hollywood personae of all time. Receiving three Best Actress Oscar nominations throughout her long career and winning once for 1945's Mildred Pierce, Joan seemed to personify the ideal American woman of every decade, from the uproarious 1920s right up until her death as a semi-reclusive corporate widow on May 10, 1977. Her fourth and last marriage was to Pepsi Cola chairman Alfred Steele, who died in 1959.

She was described by some as 'The Face' owing to her classically beautiful features. Great Hollywood studio photographer George Hurrell dubbed her "camera proof" as she photographed perfectly from every angle. She also won a British BAFTA award for the 1957 movie The Story of Esther Costello.

Her film career spanning nearly fifty years, she is best remembered for classic performances in Our Dancing Daughters (1928), Grand Hotel (1932), The Women (1939), Mildred Pierce (1945), Humoresque (1946), Possessed (1947), Harriet Craig (1950), Sudden Fear (1952), and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962).

Jai Ganesh · 2023-05-27 00:06:41

1279) Olivia de Havilland

Summary

Dame Olivia Mary de Havilland (July 1, 1916 – July 26, 2020) was a British-American actress. The major works of her cinematic career spanned from 1935 to 1988. She appeared in 49 feature films and was one of the leading actresses of her time. At the time of her death in 2020 at age 104, she was the oldest living and earliest surviving Academy Award winner and was widely considered as being the last surviving major star from the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema. Her younger sister was Oscar-winning actress Joan Fontaine.

De Havilland first came to prominence with Errol Flynn as a screen couple in adventure films such as Captain Blood (1935) and The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). One of her best-known roles is that of Melanie Hamilton in Gone with the Wind (1939), for which she received her first of five Oscar nominations, the only one for Best Supporting Actress. De Havilland departed from ingénue roles in the 1940s and later distinguished herself for performances in Hold Back the Dawn (1941), To Each His Own (1946), The Snake Pit (1948), and The Heiress (1949), receiving nominations for Best Actress for each and winning for To Each His Own and The Heiress. She was also successful in work on stage and television. De Havilland lived in Paris from the 1950s and received honours such as the National Medal of the Arts, the Légion d'honneur, and the appointment to Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire at the age of 101.

In addition to her film career, de Havilland continued her work in the theatre, appearing three times on Broadway, in Romeo and Juliet (1951), Candida (1952), and A Gift of Time (1962). She also worked in television, appearing in the successful miniseries Roots: The Next Generations (1979) and Anastasia: The Mystery of Anna (1986), for which she received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination and won the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Television Movie or Series. During her film career, de Havilland also collected two New York Film Critics Circle Awards, the National Board of Review Award for Best Actress, and the Venice Film Festival Volpi Cup. For her contributions to the motion picture industry, she received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She and her sister remain the only siblings to have won major acting Academy Awards.

Details

Olivia de Havilland, in full Dame Olivia Mary de Havilland, (born July 1, 1916, Tokyo, Japan—died July 26, 2020, Paris, France), was an American motion-picture actress remembered for the lovely and gentle ingenues of her early career as well as for the later, more-substantial roles she fought to secure.

The daughter of a British patent attorney, de Havilland and her younger sister, Joan Fontaine, moved to California in 1919 with their mother, an actress. While attending school, de Havilland was chosen from the cast of a local California production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to play Hermia in a 1935 Warner Brothers film version of that play. As the sweet-tempered beauty to Errol Flynn’s gallant swain, she appeared in many costume adventure movies of the 1930s and ’40s, including Captain Blood (1935), The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), and They Died with Their Boots On (1941). She also played romantic leading roles in Strawberry Blonde (1941), Hold Back the Dawn (1941), and The Male Animal (1942) and portrayed Melanie Wilkes in Gone with the Wind (1939).

In 1945 de Havilland won a precedent-setting case against Warner Brothers, which released her from a six-month penalty obligation appended by the studio to her seven-year contract. Free to take more-challenging roles, she gave Academy Award-winning performances in To Each His Own (1946) and The Heiress (1949). She also gave a superb performance in The Snake Pit (1948). De Havilland moved to France in 1955 and worked infrequently in films after that, most memorably in Light in the Piazza (1962), Lady in a Cage (1964), and Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964). She also appeared in a number of television plays.

Additional Information

Olivia Mary de Havilland was born on July 1, 1916 in Tokyo, Japan to British parents, Lilian Augusta (Ruse), a former actress, and Walter Augustus de Havilland, an English professor and patent attorney. Her sister Joan, later to become famous as Joan Fontaine, was born the following year. Her surname comes from her paternal grandfather, whose family was from Guernsey in the Channel Islands. Her parents divorced when Olivia was just three years old, and she moved with her mother and sister to Saratoga, California.

After graduating from high school, where she fell prey to the acting bug, Olivia enrolled in Mills College in Oakland, where she participated in the school play "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and was spotted by Max Reinhardt. She so impressed Reinhardt that he picked her up for both his stage version and, later, the Warner Bros. film version in 1935. She again was so impressive that Warner executives signed her to a seven-year contract. No sooner had the ink dried on the contract than Olivia appeared in three more films: The Irish in Us (1935), Alibi Ike (1935), and Captain Blood (1935), this last with the man with whom her career would be most closely identified: heartthrob Errol Flynn. He and Olivia starred together in eight films during their careers. In 1939 Warner Bros. loaned her to David O. Selznick for the classic Gone with the Wind (1939). Playing sweet Melanie Hamilton, Olivia received her first nomination for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, only to lose out to one of her co-stars in the film, Hattie McDaniel.

After GWTW, Olivia returned to Warner Bros. and continued to churn out films. In 1941 she played Emmy Brown in Hold Back the Dawn (1941), which resulted in her second Oscar nomination, this time for Best Actress. Again she lost, this time to her sister Joan for her role in Suspicion (1941). After that strong showing, Olivia now demanded better, more substantial roles than the "sweet young thing" slot into which Warners had been fitting her. The studio responded by placing her on a six-month suspension, all of the studios at the time operating under the policy that players were nothing more than property to do with as they saw fit. As if that weren't bad enough, when her contract with Warners was up, she was told that she needed to make up the time lost because of the suspension. Irate, she sued the studio, and for the length of the court battle she didn't appear in a single film. The result, however, was worth it. In a landmark decision, the court said that not only would Olivia not need to make up the time, but also that all performers would be limited to a seven-year contract that would include any suspensions handed down. This became known as the "de Havilland decision": no longer could studios treat their performers as chattel. Olivia returned to the screen in 1946 and made up for lost time by appearing in four films, one of which finally won her the Oscar that had so long eluded her: To Each His Own (1946), in which she played Josephine Norris to the delight of critics and audiences alike. Olivia was the strongest performer in Hollywood for the balance of the 1940s.

In 1948 she turned in another strong showing in The Snake Pit (1948) as Virginia Cunningham, a woman suffering a mental breakdown. The end result was another Oscar nomination for Best Actress, but she lost to Jane Wyman in Johnny Belinda (1948). As in the two previous years, she made only one film in 1949, but she again won a nomination and the Academy Award for Best Actress for The Heiress (1949). After a three-year hiatus, Olivia returned to star in My Cousin Rachel (1952). From that point on, she made few appearances on the screen but was seen on Broadway and in some television shows. Her last screen appearance was in The Fifth Musketeer (1979), and her last career appearance was in the TV movie The Woman He Loved (1988).

Her turbulent relationship with her only sibling, Joan Fontaine, was press fodder for many decades; the two were reported as having been permanently estranged since their mother's death in 1975, when Joan claimed that she had not been invited to the memorial service, which she only managed to hold off until she could arrive by threatening to go public. Joan also wrote in her memoir that her elder sister had been physically, psychologically, and emotionally abusive when they were young. And the iconic photo of Joan with her hand outstretched to congratulate Olivia backstage after the latter's first Oscar win and Olivia ignoring it because she was peeved by a comment Joan had made about Olivia's new husband, Marcus Goodrich, remained part of Hollywood lore for many years.

Nonetheless, late in life, Fontaine gave an interview in which she serenely denied any and all claims of an estrangement from her sister. When a reporter asked Joan if she and Olivia were friends, she replied, "Of course!" The reporter responded that rumors to the contrary must have been sensationalism and she replied, "Oh, right--they have to. Two nice girls liking each other isn't copy." Asked if she and Olivia were in communication and spoke to each other, Joan replied "Absolutely." When asked if there ever had been a time when the two did not get along to the point where they wouldn't speak with one another, Joan replied, again, "Never. Never. There is not a word of truth about that." When asked why people believe it, she replied "Oh, I have no idea. It's just something to say ... Oh, it's terrible." When asked if she had seen Olivia over the years, she replied, "I've seen her in Paris. And she came to my apartment in New York often." The reporter stated that all this was a nice thing to hear. Joan then stated, "Let me just say, Olivia and I have never had a quarrel. We have never had any dissatisfaction. We have never had hard words. And all this is press." Joan died in 2013.

During the hoopla surrounding the 50th anniversary of GWTW in 1989, Olivia graciously declined requests for all interviews as the last of the four main stars. She enjoyed a quiet retirement in Paris, France, where she resided for many decades, and where she died on 26 July, 2020, at the age of 104.

Olivia de Havilland was not only the last surviving major cast member of Gone with the Wind (1939) and one of the longest-lived major stars in Hollywood history, but she was unquestionably the last surviving iconic figure from the peak of Hollywood's golden era during the late 1930s, and her passing truly marked the end of an era.

In 2017 de Havilland was portrayed in the FX television series Feud: Bette and Joan, about the rivalry between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, the former of whom was a close friend. Later that year she sued FX and the production company, alleging that they had misappropriated her “name, likeness and identity without her permission and used them falsely in order to exploit their own commercial interests.” A California appellate court dismissed the lawsuit in 2018, and she appealed that decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case.

De Havilland was the recipient of numerous honours. She received the American National Medal of Arts in 2008, and two years later she was made a chevalier of the Legion of Honour in France, where she lived. In 2017, shortly before her 101st birthday, she was made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE).

Jai Ganesh · 2023-05-28 21:48:55

1280) Loretta Young

Summary

Loretta Young (born Gretchen Young; January 6, 1913 – August 12, 2000) was an American actress. Starting as a child, she had a long and varied career in film from 1917 to 1953. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in the film The Farmer's Daughter (1947), and received her second Academy Award nomination for her role in Come to the Stable (1949). Young moved to the relatively new medium of television, where she had a dramatic anthology series, The Loretta Young Show, from 1953 to 1961. It earned three Emmy Awards, and was re-run successfully on daytime TV and later in syndication. In the 1980s, Young returned to the small screen and won a Golden Globe for her role in Christmas Eve in 1986.

Details

Loretta Young, original name Gretchen Michaela Young, (born January 6, 1913, Salt Lake City, Utah, U.S.—died August 12, 2000, Los Angeles, California), was a motion picture actress noted for her ethereal beauty and refined, controlled portrayals of virtuous and wholesome women.

Young began her career at age four as a child extra. She later attended convent school, and at age14 she landed a part in the film Naughty but Nice (1927) that was originally intended for her sister Polly Ann. Her career blossomed as she moved quickly from bit parts to ingenues and leading ladies. She later made a smooth transition to sound films.

After a Hollywood career of more than 20 years, Young silenced many critics who regarded her as little more than a bland beauty of modest talent when she won an Oscar in 1947 for her performance in The Farmer’s Daughter. She received a second nomination for best actress in 1949 for her role as a nun in Come to the Stable. Her other notable films include The Story of Alexander Graham Bell (1939), The Stranger (1946), and The Bishop’s Wife (1947).

Retiring from films in 1953, Young hosted the Emmy Award-winning The Loretta Young Show on NBC television from 1953 to 1961, making her the first entertainer to receive both an Oscar and an Emmy. Though she acted in the majority of the episodes of the sentimental drama anthology, the show is remembered primarily for Young’s signature swirling entrances in which she displayed all sides of her glamorous contemporary gowns.

Young retired from acting at age 50, though she did make a brief comeback in two made-for-TV films in the late 1980s. A lifelong Catholic, Young devoted herself to religious charities throughout her career and into retirement. She was the mother of actress Judy Lewis, the daughter of Clark Gable.

Additional Information

Sweet, sweeter, sweetest. No combination of terms better describes the screen persona of lovely Loretta Young. A&E's Biography (1987) has stated that Young "remains a symbol of beauty, serenity, and grace. But behind the glamour and stardom is a woman of substance whose true beauty lies in her dedication to her family, her faith, and her quest to live life with a purpose."

Loretta Young was born Gretchen Young in Salt Lake City, Utah on January 6, 1913, to Gladys (Royal) and John Earle Young. Her parents separated when Loretta was three years old. Her mother moved Loretta and her two older sisters to Southern California, where Mrs. Young ran a boarding house. When Loretta was 10, her mother married one of her boarders, George Belzer. They had a daughter, Georgianna, two years later.

Loretta was appearing on screen as a child extra by the time she was four, joining her elder sisters, Polly Ann Young and Elizabeth Jane Young (later better known as Sally Blane), as child players. Mrs. Young's brother-in-law was an assistant director and got young Loretta a small role in the film The Only Way (1914). The role consisted of nothing more than a small, weeping child lying on an operating table. Later that year, she appeared in another small role, in The Primrose Ring (1917). The film starred Mae Murray, who was so taken with little Loretta that she offered to adopt her. Loretta lived with the Murrays for about a year and a half. In 1921, she had a brief scene in The Sheik (1921).

Loretta and her sisters attended parochial schools, after which they helped their mother run the boarding house. In 1927, Loretta returned to films in a small part in Naughty But Nice (1927). Even at the age of fourteen, she was an ambitious actress. Changing her name to Loretta Young, letting her blond hair revert to its natural brown and with her green eyes, satin complexion and exquisite face, she quickly graduated from ingenue to leading lady. Beginning with her role as Denise Laverne in The Magnificent Flirt (1928), she shaped any character she took on with total dedication. In 1928, she received second billing in The Head Man (1928) and continued to toil in many roles throughout the '20s and '30s, making anywhere from six to nine films a year. Her two sisters were also actresses but were not as successful as Loretta, whose natural beauty was her distinct advantage.

The 17-year-old Young made headlines in 1930 when she and Grant Withers, who was previously married and nine years her senior, eloped to Yuma, Arizona. They had both appeared in Warner Bros.' The Second Floor Mystery (1930). The marriage was annulled in 1931, the same year in which the pair would again co-star on screen in a film ironically titled Too Young to Marry (1931). By the mid-'30s, Loretta left First National Studios for rival Fox, where she had previously worked on a loan-out basis, and became one of the premier leading ladies of Hollywood.

In 1935, she made Call of the Wild (1935) with Clark Gable and it was thought they had an affair where Loretta got pregnant thereafter. Because of the strict morality clauses in their contracts - and the fact that Clark Gable was married - they could not tell anybody except Loretta's mother. Loretta and her mother left for Europe after filming on The Crusades finished. They returned in August 1935 to the United States, at which time Gladys Belzer announced Loretta's 'illness' to the press. Filming on Loretta's next film, Ramona, was also cancelled. During this time, Loretta was living in a small house in Venice, California, her mother rented. On November 6, 1935, Loretta delivered a healthy baby girl whom she named Judith.

In 1938, Loretta starred as Sally Goodwin in Kentucky (1938), an outstanding success. Her co-star Walter Brennan won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Peter Goodwin.

In 1940, Loretta married businessman Tom Lewis, and from then on her child was called Judy Lewis, although Tom Lewis never adopted her. Judy was brought up thinking that both parents had adopted her and did not know, until years later, that she was actually the biological daughter of Loretta and Clark Gable. Four years after her marriage to Tom Lewis, Loretta had a son, Christopher Lewis, and later another son, Peter Charles.

In the 1940s, Loretta was still one of the most beautiful ladies in Hollywood. She reached the pinnacle of her career when she won the Academy Award for Best Actress in The Farmer's Daughter (1947), the tale of a farm girl who rises through the ranks and becomes a congresswoman. It was a smash and today is her best remembered film. The same year, she starred in the delightful fantasy The Bishop's Wife (1947) with David Niven and Cary Grant. It was another box office success and continues to be a TV staple during the holiday season. In 1949, Loretta starred in the well-received film, Mother Is a Freshman (1949) with Van Johnson and Rudy Vallee and Come to the Stable (1949). The latter garnered Loretta her second Oscar nomination, but she lost to Olivia de Havilland in The Heiress (1949). In 1953, Loretta made It Happens Every Thursday (1953), which was to be her final big screen role.

She retired from films in 1953 and began a second, equally successful career as hostess of The Loretta Young Show (1953), a half-hour television drama anthology series which ran on NBC from September 1953 to September 1961. In addition to hosting the series, she frequently starred in episodes. Although she is most remembered for her stunning gowns and swirling entrances, over the broadcast's eight-year run she also showed again that she could act. She won Emmy awards for best actress in a dramatic series in 1954, 1956 and 1958.

After the show ended, she took some time off before returning in 1962 with The New Loretta Young Show (1962), which was not so successful, lasting only one season. For the next 24 years, Loretta did not appear in any entertainment medium. Her final performance was in a made for TV film Lady in the Corner (1989).

By 1960, Loretta was a grandmother. Her daughter Judy Lewis had married about three years before and had a daughter in 1959, whom they named Maria. Loretta and Tom Lewis divorced in the early 1960s. Loretta enjoyed retirement, sleeping late, visiting her son Chris and daughter-in-law Linda, and traveling. She and her friend Josephine Alicia Saenz, ex-wife of John Wayne, traveled to India and saw the Taj Mahal. In 1990, she became a great-grandmother when granddaughter Maria, daughter of Judy Lewis, gave birth to a boy.

Loretta lived a quiet retirement in Palm Springs, California until her death on August 12, 2000 from ovarian cancer at the home of her sister Georgiana and Georgiana's husband, Ricardo Montalban.

Jai Ganesh · 2023-05-29 22:11:30

1281) Jane Wyman

Summary

Jane Wyman (/ˈwaɪmən/ WY-mən; born Sarah Jane Mayfield; January 5, 1917 – September 10, 2007)[1] was an American actress. She received an Academy Award, three Golden Globe Awards and nominations for two Primetime Emmy Awards.

Wyman's professional career began at age 16 in 1933, when she signed with Warner Bros. A popular contract player, she frequently played the leading lady, appearing in films such as Public Wedding (1937), Brother Rat (1938), its sequel Brother Rat and a Baby (1940), Bad Men of Missouri (1941), Stage Fright (1950), So Big (1953), Magnificent Obsession (1954), and All That Heaven Allows (1955). She received four nominations for the Academy Award for Best Actress, winning for Johnny Belinda (1948). In her later years, she achieved continuing success on the soap opera Falcon Crest (1981–1990), portraying the role of villainous matriarch Angela Channing.

Wyman was the first wife of Hollywood actor and the future 40th president of the United States, Ronald Reagan.

Details

Jane Wyman, original name Sarah Jane Mayfield; also known as Sarah Jane Fulks, (born January 5, 1917, St. Joseph, Missouri, U.S.—died September 10, 2007, Rancho Mirage, California, U.S.), was an American actor who had a long, distinguished career in film and television, but was perhaps equally well known as the first wife (1940–48) of former president Ronald Reagan.

Wyman’s father died when she was a small child, and she was placed in the care of neighbours, whose last name she took. Determined to have a career in show business, Wyman moved to California and became a chorus girl. She spent several years as a singer on the radio, appearing in the choruses of movie musicals and in bit parts, and starring in a number of B movies before her portrayal of an alcoholic’s girlfriend in The Lost Weekend (1945) proved to be her breakthrough as a dramatic actress.

After starring in The Yearling (1946), for which she received her first Academy Award nomination, Wyman won the best actress Oscar for her portrayal of a deaf math victim in Johnny Belinda (1948); she also won Oscar nominations for her roles in The Blue Veil (1951) and Magnificent Obsession (1954). Other notable films included The Glass Menagerie (1950) and All That Heaven Allows (1955).

Wyman then branched out into television with the anthology series Jane Wyman Presents the Fireside Theatre (1955–58); she often hosted and starred in various episodes of the show. She semiretired but made a few more motion pictures, including Pollyanna (1960), and occasional guest appearances on television. Wyman returned to prominence and found a new audience with the TV series Falcon Crest (1981–90), in which she starred as the domineering matriarch Angela Channing, owner of a California winery.

Additional Information

Jane Wyman was born Sarah Jane Mayfield on January 5, 1917, in St. Joseph, Missouri (she was also known later as Sarah Jane Fulks). When she was only eight years old, and after her parents filed for divorce, she lost her father prematurely. After graduating high school she attempted, with the help of her mother, to break into films, but to no avail. In 1935, after attending the University of Missouri, she began a career as a radio singer, which led to her first name change to Jane Durrell. In 1936 she signed a contract with Warner Bros. Pictures and that led to another name change, the more familiar one of Jane Wyman. Under that name she appeared in "A" and "B" pictures at Warners, including two with her future husband, Ronald Reagan: Brother Rat (1938) and its sequel, Brother Rat and a Baby (1940). In the early 1940s she moved into comedies and melodramas and gained attention for her role as Ray Milland's long-suffering girlfriend in The Lost Weekend (1945). The following year she was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for her role as Ma Baxter in The Yearling (1946), and won the coveted prize in 1949 as deaf-mute victim Belinda MacDonald in Johnny Belinda (1948). She followed that with a number of appearances in more prestigious films, such as Alfred Hitchcock's Stage Fright (1950), Frank Capra's Here Comes the Groom (1951), Michael Curtiz's The Story of Will Rogers (1952) and the first movie version of The Glass Menagerie (1950). She starred opposite Bing Crosby in the musical Just for You (1952). She was Oscar-nominated for her performances in The Blue Veil (1951) and Magnificent Obsession (1954). She also starred in the immensely popular So Big (1953), Lucy Gallant (1955), All That Heaven Allows (1955) and Miracle in the Rain (1956). In addition to her extensive film career, she hosted TV's Jane Wyman Presents the Fireside Theatre (1955) and starred in most of the episodes of the show, which ran for three seasons. She came back to the big screen in Holiday for Lovers (1959), Pollyanna (1960) and her final film, How to Commit Marriage (1969). Although off the big screen, she became a presence on the small screen and starred in two made-for-TV movies, including The Incredible Journey of Doctor Meg Laurel (1979). In early 1981, in the 49th year of her career, she won the role of conniving matriarch Angela Channing Erikson Stavros Agretti in the movie "The Vintage Years", which was the unaired pilot for the prime-time soap opera Falcon Crest (1981), later in the year. For nine seasons she played that character in a way that virtually no other actress could have done, and became the moral center of the show. The show was a ratings winner from its debut in 1981, and made stars out of her fellow cast members Robert Foxworth, Lorenzo Lamas, Abby Dalton and Susan Sullivan. At the end of the first season the story line had her being informed that her evil son, played by David Selby, had inherited 50% of a California newspaper company, and the conflicts inherent in that situation led to even bigger ratings over the next five years. Wyman was nominated six times for a Soap Opera Digest Award, and in 1984 she won the Golden Globe for Best Performance by an Actress in a TV Series Drama. By the show's eighth season, however, she was emotionally drained and the strain of constantly working to keep up the quality of a hit show took its toll on her. In addition, there was friction on the set among cast members. All of these events culminated in her departure from the show after the first two episodes of the ninth season (her character was hospitalized and slipped into a coma) for health reasons. After a period of recuperation, she believed that she had recovered enough to guest-star in the last three episodes of the season (her doctor disagreed, but she did it anyway). She then guest-starred as Jane Seymour's mother on Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman (1993) and three years later appeared in Wild Bill: Hollywood Maverick (1995). In the late 1990s she purchased a home in Rancho Mirage, California, where she lived in retirement. Her daughter, Maureen Reagan (who died in August 2001), was a writer who also involved herself in political issues and organized a powerful foundation. Also, she placed her 3200-sq.-ft. Rancho Mirage condominium on the market. Jane Wyman died at the age of 90, at her Palm Springs, California home, on September 10, 2007, having long suffered from arthritis and diabetes. It was reported that Wyman died in her sleep of natural causes at the Rancho Mirage Country Club.

Jai Ganesh · 2023-05-31 21:33:07

1282) Judy Holliday

Summary

Judy Holliday (born Judith Tuvim, June 21, 1921 – June 7, 1965) was an American actress, comedian and singer.

She began her career as part of a nightclub act before working in Broadway plays and musicals. Her success as Billie Dawn in the 1946 stage production of Born Yesterday led to her being cast in the 1950 film version for which she won an Academy Award for Best Actress and a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy. She was known for her performance on Broadway in the musical Bells Are Ringing, winning a Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical and reprising her role in the 1960 film adaptation.

In 1952, Holliday was called to testify before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee to answer claims she was associated with communism.

Details

Judy Holliday, original name Judith Tuvim, (born June 21, 1921, New York, New York, U.S.—died June 7, 1965, New York City), was an American actress noted for her distinctive voice and her warm, intelligent portrayal of funny and endearing “dumb blondes” onstage and in film.

Holliday’s father was a respected New York civic leader; her mother was a music teacher; and her uncle, Joseph Gollomb, was a writer. She took her stage name from the English translation of her family name, Tuvim, the Hebrew word for holiday. After working briefly as a switchboard operator for Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre ensemble, she joined with several friends to form a comedy sketch troupe in 1939. Called the Revuers, the troupe (which included Betty Comden and Adolph Green) began performing at cafés and cabarets in New York City and later in Los Angeles and on radio. As a result of the Revuers’ success, Holliday signed a contract with Twentieth Century Fox and played bit parts in three feature films in the mid-1940s.

Obtaining a release from her movie contract, Holliday made her Broadway debut in Kiss Them for Me (1945), receiving praise for her supporting performance as a wistful prostitute. She was then cast as a last-minute replacement for ailing star Jean Arthur in Garson Kanin’s Born Yesterday and memorized the difficult role of dim-witted ex-chorine Billy Dawn in three days. The play was a hit, running on Broadway from February 1946 to December 1949, and Holliday’s portrayal of the New York chorus girl who outsmarts a crooked tycoon as easily as she beats him at gin rummy earned particular praise. Nevertheless, Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia Pictures, was reluctant to star the actress in his film version of the play. Kanin, Katharine Hepburn, and George Cukor rallied round, however, and showcased Holliday’s comic talent in a scene-stealing supporting part in their hit film Adam’s Rib (1949). Holliday’s hilarious performance as a wide-eyed bumbler on trial for shooting her unfaithful husband helped convince Cohn to sign her for Born Yesterday (1950). Recreating her stage role, she charmed audiences and won an Academy Award.

Holliday’s screen persona of a squeaky-voiced birdbrain proved beneficial when she was ordered to testify before the U.S. Senate subcommittee on internal security in 1952. Refusing to identify her friends and coworkers as communist sympathizers, Holliday—who reportedly had an IQ of 172—beguiled the committee by “playing dumb” and survived the ordeal with her career and integrity intact.

Holliday went on to make a handful of delightful film comedies, including The Marrying Kind (1952), The Solid Gold Cadillac (1956), and Full of Life (1956). She and Jack Lemmon formed a memorable comic partnership in Lemmon’s first two films, It Should Happen to You (1954) and Phffft! (1954). She returned to Broadway in November 1956, where her old colleagues Comden and Green had tailored for her the female lead in the musical Bells Are Ringing, for which she won the Tony Award for best actress in a musical. In her last film (1960), Holliday re-created her stage role in Bells Are Ringing. She starred in two more Broadway shows, Laurette (1960) and Hot Spot (1963)—both unsuccessful—before succumbing to cancer in 1965.

Additional Information

Judy Holliday was born Judith Tuvim in New York City on June 21, 1921. Her mother, a piano teacher, was attending a play when she went into labor and made it to the hospital just in time. Judy was an only child. By the age of four, her mother had her enrolled in ballet school which fostered a life-long interest in show business. Two years later her parents divorced. In high school, Judy began to develop an interest in theater. She appeared in several high school plays. After graduation, she got a job in the Orson Welles Mercury Theater as a switchboard operator. Judy worked her way on the stage with appearance in Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C. and New York City. Judy toured on the nightclub circuit with a group called "The Revuers" founded by Betty Comden and Adolph Green. She went to Hollywood to make her first foray into the film world in Greenwich Village (1944). Most of her scenes ended up on the cutting room floor. Disappointed, but not discouraged, Judy earned two more roles that year in Something for the Boys (1944) and Winged Victory (1944). In the latter, Judy had a few lines of dialogue. Judy returned to New York to continue her stage career. She returned to Hollywood after five years to appear in Adam's Rib (1949) as Doris Attinger opposite screen greats Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy and Tom Ewell. With her success in that role, Judy was signed to play Billie Dawn in Born Yesterday (1950), a role which she originated on Broadway. She was nominated for and won the best actress Oscar for her performance. After filming The Marrying Kind (1952), Judy was summoned before the Un-American Activities Committee to testify about her political affiliations. Fortunately for her, she was not blacklisted as were many of her counterparts, but damage was done. Her film career was curtailed somewhat, but rebounded. She continued with her stage and musical efforts, but with limited time on the screen. After filming The Solid Gold Cadillac (1956), she was off-screen for four years. Her last film was the MGM production of Bells Are Ringing (1960) with Dean Martin and it was one of her best. Judy died two weeks before her 44th birthday in New York City on June 7, 1965.

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Jai Ganesh · 2023-06-03 23:04:26

1283) Shirley Booth

Summary

Shirley Booth (born Marjory Ford; August 30, 1898 – October 16, 1992) was an American actress. One of 24 performers to achieve the Triple Crown of Acting, Booth was the recipient of an Academy Award, two Primetime Emmy Awards and three Tony Awards.

Primarily a theater actress, Booth began her career on Broadway in 1925. Her most significant success was as Lola Delaney, in the drama Come Back, Little Sheba, for which she received her second Tony Award in 1950 (she would go on to win three). She made her film debut, reprising her role in the 1952 film version, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress and the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress for her performance. Despite her successful entry into films, she preferred acting on the stage, and made only four more films.

From 1961 to 1966, she played the title role in the sitcom Hazel, for which she won two Primetime Emmy Awards. She was acclaimed for her performance in the 1966 television production of The Glass Menagerie. Her final role was providing the voice of Mrs. Claus in the 1974 animated Christmas television special The Year Without a Santa Claus.

Details

Shirley Booth, original name Thelma Booth Ford, (born August 30, 1898, New York, N.Y., U.S.—died October 16, 1992, North Chatham, Mass.), was an American actress who was equally deft in both dramatic and comedic roles and who was the recipient of three Tony Awards, two Emmy Awards, and an Oscar.

An amateur actress at age 12, Booth made her professional debut in a regional theatre production of The Cat and the Canary (1923) and her Broadway debut two years later in Hell’s Bells (1925), a production that also featured the young Humphrey Bogart. She appeared in small roles on Broadway and in stock companies before scoring her first Broadway success with Three Men on a Horse (1935). Booth gradually developed a reputation as one of Broadway’s finest actresses and appeared in more than 40 plays during the following two decades, including Excursion (1937), The Philadelphia Story (1939), My Sister Eileen (1940), Tomorrow the World (1943), and Hollywood Pinafore (1945). She received her first Tony Award for Goodbye, My Fancy in 1949 and a second Tony the following year for one of her hallmark roles, that of the slovenly housewife Lola in William Inge’s Come Back, Little Sheba. She next delivered a highly praised performance in the musical version of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1951) and won her final Tony Award two seasons later for Time of the Cuckoo (1953).

Booth’s motion picture career was limited to five films made between 1952 and 1958; two of them are notable. For her screen debut, she reprised the role of Lola in the screen adaptation of Come Back, Little Sheba (1952) and was awarded an Oscar for best actress. Her other memorable screen performance was as Dolly Levi in the film version of Thornton Wilder’s stage play The Matchmaker (1958), the play upon which the musical Hello, Dolly! was based. Though the film and Booth’s performance were well received, it was to be her final appearance on the big screen.

Booth achieved the height of her fame during the 1960s with her portrayal of the domineering but lovable housemaid Hazel Burke on the television situation comedy Hazel (1961–66). Critics complained that an actress of her skills had no business in such a lowly vehicle, yet the role succeeded in making Booth a household name and won for her two Emmy Awards. Upon cancellation of the series, she appeared in the role of Amanda Wingfield for a televised production of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (1966). She starred in another short-lived sitcom (A Touch of Grace, 1973) and, in her final performance before her retirement, provided the voice for Mrs. Santa Claus in the animated television special The Year Without a Santa Claus (1974).

Additional Information

Character actress Shirley Booth could play everything in all facets of show business, whether it was Miss Duffy the Tavern Owner's Man Crazy Daughter on "Duffy's Tavern", the sassy maid on TV's Hazel (1961) or the pathetic woman in Come Back, Little Sheba (1952). For those who only know her through her sitcom, it might be hard to believe she was a seasoned theatrical veteran, having appeared on Broadway from 1925-70. She was highly regarded as a stage actress and ranks as one of the premier talents of the 20th-century theatre.

Jai Ganesh · 2023-06-05 22:31:18

1284) Grace Kelly

Summary

Grace Patricia Kelly (November 12, 1929 – September 14, 1982) was the Princess of Monaco and an American actress. After starring in several significant films in the early to mid-1950s, she became Princess of Monaco when she married Prince Rainier III on April 18, 1956. She held the role until her death in 1982. She is known as an iconic actress of the Golden Age of Hollywood. She received an Academy Award, three Golden Globe Awards and is listed 13th among the American Film Institute's 25 Greatest Female Stars of Classical Hollywood cinema.

Kelly was born into a prominent Catholic family in Philadelphia. After graduating from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1949, Kelly began appearing in New York City theatrical productions and television broadcasts. She made her film debut in Fourteen Hours (1951) and gained stardom from her roles in Fred Zinnemann's western film High Noon (1952), and John Ford's adventure-romance Mogambo (1953), the later of which earned her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress nomination. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in the drama The Country Girl (1954). Other notable works include the war film The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1954), the romantic comedy High Society (1956), and three Alfred Hitchcock suspense thrillers: Dial M for Murder (1954), Rear Window (1954), and To Catch a Thief (1955).

Kelly retired from acting at age 26 to marry Rainier and began her duties as Princess of Monaco. The couple had three children: Princess Caroline, Prince Albert, and Princess Stéphanie. Her charity work focused on young children and the arts. In 1964, she established the Princess Grace Foundation to support local artisans. Her organization for children's rights, AMADE Mondiale, gained consultive status within UNICEF and UNESCO. Her final film role was narrating The Children of Theatre Street (1977) which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

Kelly died at the age of 52 at Monaco Hospital on September 14, 1982, from injuries sustained in a car crash the previous day. Her son, Prince Albert, helped establish the Princess Grace Awards in 1984 to recognize emerging performers in film, theatre, and dance.

Details

Grace Kelly, original name in full Grace Patricia Kelly, also called (from 1956) Princess Grace of Monaco or French Princesse Grace de Monaco (born November 12, 1929, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died September 14, 1982, Monte Carlo, Monaco), was an American actress of films and television, known for her stately beauty and reserve. She starred in 11 motion pictures before abandoning a Hollywood career to marry Rainier III, prince de Monaco, in 1956.

Kelly was born into a wealthy Irish Catholic family in Philadelphia; her father was John B. Kelly, a gold-medal winning oarsman, and her uncle was the playwright George Kelly. She was educated in convent and private schools before attending the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City in 1947. She worked as a photographer’s model to pay her tuition. After several seasons of acting in summer stock, Kelly made her Broadway debut in November 1949 in August Strindberg’s The Father. She was cast in a number of television dramas in the early 1950s. In 1951 she made her big-screen debut, appearing in a minor role in Fourteen Hours. The following year she gave a breakthrough performance as Gary Cooper’s Quaker wife in High Noon.

Kelly’s next film was John Ford’s Mogambo (1953), in which she starred as a young bride who falls in love with a big-game hunter (played by Clark Gable) who has also caught the interest of a former showgirl (Ava Gardner). For her performance, Kelly received her first Academy Award nomination. She earned further acclaim for The Country Girl (1954), a screen version of Clifford Odets’s play. Cast against type as the dowdy wife of an alcoholic actor (portrayed by Bing Crosby), Kelly won an Oscar for best actress.

Despite such notable works, Kelly’s most memorable roles were arguably those in a series of classic Alfred Hitchcock films. She first worked with the director in Dial M for Murder (1954), in which she played an adulterous wife whose husband (Ray Milland) plots to have her killed. That year she also starred in Rear Window, cast as the girlfriend of a photographer (James Stewart) who becomes convinced that his neighbour has committed murder. In To Catch a Thief (1955), Kelly starred opposite Cary Grant. The romantic caper is noted for its ad-libbed scenes rife with double entendres between the two actors. Kelly was widely regarded as the perfect Hitchcock heroine, epitomizing what he called “sexual elegance.”

After making The Swan (1956) and High Society (1956), Kelly retired from the screen to marry Prince Rainier. The couple wed in a civil ceremony on April 18, 1956, and an opulent religious ceremony took place the following day; Kelly became princess of Monaco. The couple had three children—Caroline, Albert, and Stéphanie—and Princess Grace was active in charitable and cultural work. Although she repeatedly resisted attempts to lure her back into performing, she reportedly agreed to star in Hitchock’s Marnie (1964) before backing out of the project. However, she did lend her narration to one or two documentary films and gave occasional poetry readings. In addition, in 1976 she joined the board of Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation.

On September 13, 1982, Princess Grace suffered a stroke while driving on a winding road at Cap-d’Ail in the Côte d’Azur region of France. She lost control of the car, which plunged down a 45-foot (14-metre) embankment. The following day Princess Grace died. Her daughter Stéphanie, who was also in the automobile, suffered only minor injuries.

Additional Information

On November 12, 1929, Grace Patricia Kelly was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to wealthy parents. Her girlhood was uneventful for the most part, but one of the things she desired was to become an actress which she had decided on at an early age. After her high school graduation in 1947, Grace struck out on her own, heading to New York's bright lights to try her luck there. Grace worked some as a model and made her debut on Broadway in 1949. She also made a brief foray into the infant medium of television. Not content with the work in New York, Grace moved to Southern California for the more prestigious part of acting -- motion pictures. In 1951, she appeared in her first film entitled Fourteen Hours (1951) when she was 22. It was a small part, but a start nonetheless. The following year she landed the role of Amy Kane in High Noon (1952), a western starring Gary Cooper and Lloyd Bridges which turned out to be very popular. In 1953, Grace appeared in only one film, but it was another popular one. The film was Mogambo (1953) where Grace played Linda Nordley. The film was a jungle drama in which fellow cast members, Clark Gable and Ava Gardner turned in masterful performances. It was also one of the best films ever released by MGM. Although she got noticed with High Noon, her work with director Alfred Hitchcock, which began with Dial M for Murder (1954) made her a star. Her standout performance in Rear Window (1954) brought her to prominence. As Lisa Fremont, she was cast opposite James Stewart, who played a crippled photographer who witnesses a murder in the next apartment from his wheelchair. Grace stayed busy in 1954 appearing in five films. Grace would forever be immortalized by winning the Academy Award for Best Actress for her portrayal of Georgie Elgin opposite Bing Crosby in The Country Girl (1954). In 1955, Grace once again teamed with Hitchcock in To Catch a Thief (1955) co-starring Cary Grant. In 1956, she played Tracy Lord in the musical comedy High Society (1956) which also starred Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby. The whimsical tale ended with her re-marrying her former husband, played by Crosby. The film was well received. It also turned out to be her final acting performance. Grace had recently met and married Prince Rainier of the little principality of Monaco. By becoming a princess, she gave up her career. For the rest of her life, she was to remain in the news with her marriage and her three children. On September 14, 1982, Grace was killed in an automobile accident in her adoptive home country. She was just 52 years old.

Born : November 12, 1929
Died : September 14, 1982(52).

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Jai Ganesh · 2023-06-06 20:55:10

1285) Anna Magnani

Summary

Anna Maria Magnani (7 March 1908 – 26 September 1973) was an Italian actress. She was known for her explosive acting and earthy, realistic portrayals of characters.

Born in Rome, she worked her way through Rome's Academy of Dramatic Art by singing at night clubs. During her career, her only child was stricken by polio when he was 18 months old and remained disabled. She was referred to as "La Lupa", the "perennial toast of Rome" and a "living she-wolf symbol" of the cinema. Time described her personality as "fiery", and drama critic Harold Clurman said her acting was "volcanic". In the realm of Italian cinema, she was "passionate, fearless, and exciting," an actress whom film historian Barry Monush calls "the volcanic earth mother of all Italian cinema." Director Roberto Rossellini called her "the greatest acting genius since Eleonora Duse". Playwright Tennessee Williams became an admirer of her acting and wrote The Rose Tattoo (1955) specifically for her to star in, a role for which she received an Academy Award for Best Actress, becoming the first Italian - and first non-English speaking woman - to win an Oscar.

After meeting director Goffredo Alessandrini, she received her first screen role in The Blind Woman of Sorrento (La cieca di Sorrento, 1934) and later achieved international attention in Rossellini's Rome, Open City (1945), which is seen as launching the Italian neorealism movement in cinema. As an actress, she became recognized for her dynamic and forceful portrayals of "earthy lower-class women" in such films as L'Amore (1948), Bellissima (1951), The Rose Tattoo (1955), The Fugitive Kind (1960) and Mamma Roma (1962). As early as 1950, Life had already stated that Magnani was "one of the most impressive actresses since Garbo".

Details

Anna Magnani, (born March 7, 1908, Rome, Italy—died September 26, 1973, Rome), was an Italian actress, best known for her forceful portrayals of earthy, working-class women.

Born out of wedlock, Magnani never knew her father and was deserted by her mother. She was reared by her maternal grandparents in a Roman slum. She briefly attended the Academy of Dramatic Art in Rome before joining a touring repertory company. As an entertainer in Roman nightclubs, she specialized in bawdy street songs and in vaudeville. She made her film debut in La cieca di Sorrento (1934; The Blind Woman of Sorrento). When she appeared in Roberto Rossellini’s classic Neorealist film Roma città aperta (1945; Open City), she achieved international renown. Representative of her many roles, in which she often portrayed emotions that ranged from mental torment and deep grief to exuberant comedy, were the dynamic housewife in L’onorevole Angelina (1947), who led a fight against black-marketeering in postwar Italy; a shepherdess in Il miracolo (1948; The Miracle), who was seduced by a stranger she imagined to be a saint; an aggressive stage mother in Bellissima (1951); the robust widow of a truck driver in The Rose Tattoo (1955), her first Hollywood film, for which she won the Academy Award for best actress; and the wife of an Italian mayor in The Secret of Santa Vittoria (1969).

Additional Information

Anna Magnani was born in Rome, Italy (not in Egypt, as some biographies claim), on March 7, 1908. She was the child of Marina Magnani and an unknown father often said to be from Alexandria, Egypt, but whom Anna herself claimed was from the Calabria region of Italy although she never knew his name. Raised in poverty by her maternal grandmother in Rome after her mother left her, Anna worked her way through Rome's Academy of Dramatic Art by singing in cabarets and night-clubs, then began touring the countryside with small repertory companies.

Although she had a small role in a silent film in the late 1920s, she was not known as a film actress until Doctor, Beware (1941), directed by Vittorio De Sica. Her break-through film was Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City (1945) (A.K.A. Open City), generally regarded as the first commercially successful Italian neorealist film of the postwar years and the one that won her an international reputation. From then on, she didn't stop working in films and television, winning an Academy Award for her performance in the screen version of Tennessee Williams' The Rose Tattoo (1955), a part that was written for her by her close friend Williams. She worked with all of Italy's leading directors of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.

She was renowned for her earthy, passionate, woman-of-the-soil roles. She and Rossellini were lovers for some years after Open City, until he began his infamous affair with Ingrid Bergman. She had one child, Luca, with Italian actor Massimo Serato. The boy was later stricken with polio and Magnani dedicated her life to caring for him. Her only marriage, to Italian director Goffredo Alessandrini in the mid-1930s, lasted only a short while and ended in an annulment. Her last film was Federico Fellini's Roma (1972). She died in her native Rome from pancreatic cancer the following year at age sixty-five.

Jai Ganesh · 2023-06-08 21:25:41

1286) Joanne Woodward

Summary

Joanne Gignilliat Trimmier Woodward (born February 27, 1930) is an American actress. A star since the Golden Age of Hollywood, Woodward made her career breakthrough in the 1950s and earned esteem and respect playing complex women with a characteristic nuance and depth of character. She is one of the first film stars to have an equal presence in television. Her accolades include an Academy Award, three Primetime Emmy Awards, a British Academy Film Award, three Golden Globe Awards, and a Screen Actors Guild Award. She is one of the last surviving stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema and the oldest living Best Actress Oscar-winner.

Woodward is perhaps best known for her performance as a woman with dissociative identity disorder in The Three Faces of Eve (1957), which earned her an Academy Award for Best Actress and a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama. In a career spanning more than six decades, Woodward starred or co-starred in many feature films, receiving four Oscar nominations (winning one), ten Golden Globe Award nominations (winning three), four BAFTA Film Award nominations (winning one), and nine Primetime Emmy Award nominations (winning three).

Woodward is the widow of actor Paul Newman, with whom she often collaborated either as a co-star, or as an actor in films directed or produced by him. Woodward's career is notable not only for its unusual longevity, but for the range and depth of roles which she played. In 1960, she became the first person to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

In 1990, Woodward earned a bachelor's degree from Sarah Lawrence College at age 60, graduating alongside her daughter Clea.

Details

Joanne Woodward, in full Joanne Gignilliat Trimmier Woodward, (born February 27, 1930, Thomasville, Georgia, U.S.), is an American actress best known for her role in The Three Faces of Eve (1957) and for her 50-year marriage to actor Paul Newman. Woodward, who was naturally beautiful and poised, was highly respected and much lauded for her convincing portrayals in film, on television, and onstage. Her early spirited and strong roles distinguished her from others cast in the glamorous, helpless roles for women that were a trademark of 1950s Hollywood.

As a child, Woodward acted in local theatre productions in Greenville, South Carolina. After majoring in drama for two years at Louisiana State University, Woodward went home to Greenville and joined the Greenville Little Theatre, where she won her first acting award—for her performance as Laura Wingfield in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie. She eventually moved to New York City to test her skills. She studied at The Actors Studio and the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre. She landed an understudy role in William Inge’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Picnic (1953–54) and, while working on the production, met Newman, a fellow cast member, then making his Broadway debut.

Throughout the 1950s Woodward appeared in numerous television programs. She got her first major film role in 1955 as the unkempt and spunky teenager Lissy in the western Count Three and Pray. The following year she appeared in the crime thriller A Kiss Before Dying opposite Robert Wagner. In 1957 she starred as a young Georgia housewife suffering from multiple personality disorder (now called dissociative identity disorder) in Nunnally Johnson’s The Three Faces of Eve. Her performance as three distinct personalities—Eve White, Eve Black, and Jane—in one person earned her an Academy Award for best actress.

Woodward and Newman costarred in The Long, Hot Summer, based on two stories and a novel by William Faulkner. Released in 1958, it was the first of their many on-screen collaborations, and they married later that year. Woodward went on to star in a string of successful films, including (opposite Newman) Rally ’Round the Flag, Boys! (1958), From the Terrace (1960), and Paris Blues (1961) and (opposite Marlon Brando) Sidney Lumet’s The Fugitive Kind (1960). After a two-year hiatus to care for her two young daughters, Woodward returned to Hollywood in 1963, but she did not have another success until Rachel, Rachel (1968), which was Newman’s directorial debut. Woodward’s performance as a 35-year-old unmarried schoolteacher earned her a New York Film Critics Circle best actress award and an Academy Award nomination for best actress. She earned two more nominations for best actress in a leading role, the first for her work in Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams (1973), in which she played a depressed housewife who suffers a midlife crisis when her mother dies. The second nomination came later, for her role in Mr. & Mrs. Bridge (1990), a film set in the 1930s that focuses on the relationship between Walter and India Bridge (Newman and Woodward), a wealthy Midwestern American couple who struggle to keep pace with their grown children and the changing world. Woodward also won praise for her performance as a vulgar alcoholic mother in The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (1972), again under Newman’s direction.

In the late 1970s Woodward took on numerous roles in made-for-television movies, including the miniseries Sybil (1976), in which she played the doctor who treats a woman with multiple personalities played by Sally Field—a particularly apt role for Woodward considering her own film history. In 1978 she won an Emmy for her role as Betty Quinn in See How She Runs, the story of a divorced 40-year-old schoolteacher who changes the course of her life when she chooses to run the Boston Marathon. Woodward continued acting for television, appearing in about a dozen more movies over the next two decades. In 1979 she made her directorial debut, with an episode in the series Family (1976–80). She also directed “Come Along with Me” (1982), an episode of the television anthology series American Playhouse that was based on the story of that name by Shirley Jackson, but thereafter for the screen she stuck to acting.

Woodward won a second Emmy Award for her portrayal of a woman suffering from Alzheimer disease in the TV movie Do You Remember Love (1985). Husband and wife teamed up again when Newman directed Woodward as Amanda Wingfield in a screen adaptation of The Glass Menagerie (1987) and again when they costarred in Mr. & Mrs. Bridge. In 1993 she appeared as the mother of Tom Hanks’s character in the Academy Award-winning movie Philadelphia, and that same year she was the narrator of Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence, based on Edith Wharton’s novel of the same name. Woodward’s last collaboration with her husband before he died, in 2008, was in the cable television miniseries Empire Falls (2005), based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book of that name by Richard Russo. Though Woodward and Newman were considered Hollywood nobility, their lifestyle was by no means typical. Woodward in particular eschewed the typical trappings of stardom. They kept their private lives private, opting to live quietly and raise their family out of the limelight in Westport, Connecticut, and managed to make their marriage last half a century.

While continuing to act—more onstage than on-screen—Woodward spent her later years working with her husband on philanthropic causes, including their charity-focused Newman’s Own Foundation and, for children with life-threatening illnesses, the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp. In 2000 she became a supporter of the Westport Country Playhouse in Westport, Connecticut, and from 2001 to 2005 she also served as its artistic director. In addition, she directed and acted in select productions at the playhouse.

Additional Information

Joanne Gignilliat Trimmier Woodward was born on February 27, 1930, in Thomasville, Georgia, to Wade Woodward and Elinor Gignilliat Trimmier Woodward in a modest household. Her one older brother, Wade Jr., who was the favorite of her father, eventually became an architect. Elinor Woodward was a quite a movie buff and enjoyed going to picture shows often. Joanne claims she was nearly born in the middle of a Joan Crawford movie (Our Modern Maidens (1929)). Her mother wanted to name her Joan, but being Southern, she changed it to Joanne.

Thomasville was a typical small town in southern Georgia, around ten miles from the Florida border. Joanne was born right into the Great Depression. Her father was an administrator in the Thomasville school system, and her family was raised Episcopalian. Joanne's mother being an avid movie lover, it wasn't a surprise that Joanne wanted to go into the acting profession. Her father wasn't too keen on the idea, but her mother saw it coming and was thrilled. Joanne and her mother both adored the movie Wuthering Heights (1939) starring Laurence Olivier, and in 1939 Elinor took her daughter to the premiere of Gone with the Wind (1939) in Atlanta. Pulling up in a limo with the love of his life, Vivien Leigh (who starred in Gone with the Wind (1939)), Laurence Olivier was shocked when 9-year-old Joanne hopped right into the limo and sat in his lap without any warning. Years later when Joanne was famous, Olivier keenly remembered this incident. She later worked with Olivier in Come Back, Little Sheba (1977).

In her teens, Joanne entered and won many Georgia beauty contests. Her mother said that "she was the prettiest girl in town". But all Joanne wanted to do was act, and she saw beauty contests as the first step toward her dream. When she was of age, she enrolled in Louisiana State University, majoring in drama. After graduation and doing small plays, Joanne headed to New York and studied acting with Sanford Meisner. The first thing he tackled was Joanne's southern drawl.

Soon, Joanne was starring in television productions and theater. One day, she was introduced by her agent to another young actor at her level by the then-unknown name of Paul Newman. Paul's first reaction was, "Jeez, what an extraordinarily pretty girl". Joanne, while admitting that he was very good-looking, didn't like him at first sight, but she couldn't resist him. Soon they were working closely together as understudies for the Broadway production of "Picnic" and got along very well. They would have long conversations about anything and everything. Then both their movie careers took off: Joanne with Count Three and Pray (1955) and Paul with The Silver Chalice (1954). Also adding to the tension was Paul's wife, Jackie, who refused to get a divorce when Paul asked her for one. He wanted to marry Joanne; Jackie would simply not have it. Eventually, Jackie saw the anguish this was causing Paul and agreed to a divorce. Less than a week after the divorce was final, Paul married Joanne in Las Vegas on January 29, 1958, just months before Joanne won her Best Actress Oscar for The Three Faces of Eve (1957), in which she plays a woman with multiple personality disorder.

On April 8, 1959, Joanne gave birth to their first child, Elinor Teresa Newman, named after her and Paul's mothers. They both continued on with their careers, doing movies both together and apart. Two more children followed: Melissa Steward Newman on September 17, 1961, and Claire Olivia Newman on April 21, 1965. Since then, Joanne has been extremely busy in theater, film and television as well as ballet performances and very involved with charities and taking care of her family. In 2003, Joanne starred in a movie with Paul on HBO.

Jai Ganesh · 2023-06-10 17:41:45

1287) Susan Hayward

Summary

Susan Hayward (born Edythe Marrenner; June 30, 1917 – March 14, 1975) was an Academy Award-winning American film actress, best known for her film portrayals of women that were based on true stories.

After working as a fashion model for the Walter Thornton Model Agency, Hayward traveled to Hollywood in 1937 to audition for the role of Scarlett O'Hara. She secured a film contract and played several small supporting roles over the next few years.

By the late 1940s, the quality of her film roles improved, and she achieved recognition for her dramatic abilities with the first of five Academy Award for Best Actress nominations for her performance as an alcoholic in Smash-Up, the Story of a Woman (1947). Hayward's success continued through the 1950s as she received nominations for My Foolish Heart (1949), With a Song in My Heart (1952), and I'll Cry Tomorrow (1955), winning the Academy Award for her portrayal of death row inmate Barbara Graham in I Want to Live! (1958). For her performance in I'll Cry Tomorrow she won the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actress.

After Hayward's second marriage and subsequent move to Georgia, her film appearances became infrequent; although she continued acting in film and television until 1972. She died in 1975 of brain cancer.

Details

Susan Hayward was born Edythe Marrener in Brooklyn, New York, on June 30, 1917. Her father was a transportation worker, and Susan lived a fairly comfortable life as a child, but the precocious little redhead had no idea of the life that awaited her. She attended public school in Brooklyn, where she graduated from a commercial high school that was intended to give students a marketable skill. She had planned on becoming a secretary, but her plans changed. She started doing some modeling work for photographers in the NYC area. By 1937, her beauty in full bloom, she went to Hollywood when the nationwide search was on for someone to play the role of Scarlett O'Hara in Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind (1939). Although she--along with several hundred other aspiring Scarletts--lost out to Vivien Leigh, Susan was to carve her own signature in Hollywood circles. In 1937 she got a bit part in Hollywood Hotel (1937). The bit parts continued all through 1938, with Susan playing, among other things, a coed, a telephone operator and an aspiring actress. She wasn't happy with these bit parts, but she also realized she had to "pay her dues". In 1939 she finally landed a part with substance, playing Isobel Rivers in the hit action film Beau Geste (1939). In 1941 she played Millie Perkins in the offbeat thriller Among the Living (1941). This quirky little film showed Hollywood Susan's considerable dramatic qualities for the first time. She then played a Southern belle in Cecil B. DeMille's Reap the Wild Wind (1942), one of the director's bigger successes, and once again showed her mettle as an actress. Following that movie she starred with Paulette Goddard and Fred MacMurray in The Forest Rangers (1942), playing tough gal Tana Mason. Although such films as Jack London (1943), And Now Tomorrow (1944) and Deadline at Dawn (1946) continued to showcase her talent, she still hadn't gotten the meaty role she craved. In 1947, however, she did, and received the first of five Academy Award nominations, this one for her portrayal of Angelica Evans in Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman (1947). She played the part to the hilt and many thought she would take home the Oscar, but she lost out to Loretta Young for The Farmer's Daughter (1947). In 1949 Susan was nominated again for My Foolish Heart (1949) and again was up against stiff competition, but once more her hopes were dashed when Olivia de Havilland won for The Heiress (1949). Now, however, with two Oscar nominations under her belt, Susan was a force to be reckoned with. Good scripts finally started to come her way and she chose carefully because she wanted to appear in good quality productions. Her caution paid off, as she garnered yet a third nomination in 1953 for With a Song in My Heart (1952). Later that year she starred as Rachel Donaldson Robards Jackson in The President's Lady (1953). She was superb as Andrew Jackson's embittered wife, who dies before he was able to take office as President of the United States. After her fourth Academy Award nomination for I'll Cry Tomorrow (1955), Susan began to wonder if she would ever take home the coveted gold statue. She didn't have much longer to wait, though. In 1958 she gave the performance of her lifetime as real-life California killer Barbara Graham in I Want to Live! (1958), who was convicted of murder and sentenced to death in the gas chamber. Susan was absolutely riveting in her portrayal of the doomed woman. Many film buffs consider it to be one of the finest performances of all time, and this time she was not only nominated for Best Actress, but won. After that role she appeared in about one movie a year. In 1972 she made her last theatrical film, The Revengers (1972). She had been diagnosed with cancer, and the disease finally claimed her life on March 14, 1975, in Hollywood. She was 57.

The youngest of three children, Edythe Marrenner was born in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, New York. Her father and mother, who were of Irish and Swedish descent respectively, endowed her with the milky complexion and ruby mane that would become her trademark. She grew up in poverty in the shadow of her older sister Florence who was her mother's favorite. Edythe would nurse a life-long grudge over what she perceived as her mother's neglect.

As a teenager, Edythe was brought to Hollywood as one of the hundreds of girls who had won a chance to screen test for the part of Scarlet O'Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939). The test was abysmal. It would take several years of studio subsidized acting and voice lessons before her talent would emerge and she would be renamed Susan Hayward. Susan's personality is usually described as cold, icy, and aloof. She did not like socializing with crowds. She disliked homosexuals and effeminate men. Her taste in love ran strictly to the masculine, and both of her husbands were rugged Southerners. She loved sport fishing, and owned three ocean going boats for that purpose. Movie directors enjoyed Susan's professionalism and her high standards. She was considered easy to work with, but she was not chummy after the cameras stopped. Her greatest roles were in I'll Cry Tomorrow (1955) and I Want to Live! (1958). The latter won her an Academy Award for best actress. A two-pack a day smoker with a taste for drink, Susan was diagnosed with brain cancer in March of 1972. On 14 March 1975, after a three year struggle against the disease, Susan died at her Hollywood home. Susan Hayward was laid to rest in a grave adjacent that of her husband Eaton Chalkley in the peace of Carrollton, Georgia where they had spent several happy years together in life.

Jai Ganesh · 2023-06-12 18:40:33

1288) Simone Signoret

Details

Simone Signoret (born Simone Henriette Charlotte Kaminker; 25 March 1921 – 30 September 1985) was a French actress. She received various accolades, including an Academy Award, three BAFTA Awards, a César Award, a Primetime Emmy Award, and the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actress, in addition to nominations for two Golden Globe Awards.

Early life

Signoret was born Simone Henriette Charlotte Kaminker in Wiesbaden, Germany, to Georgette (née Signoret) and André Kaminker. She was the eldest of three children, with two younger brothers. Her father, a pioneering interpreter who worked in the League of Nations, was a French-born army officer from a Polish Jewish and Hungarian Jewish family, who brought the family to Neuilly-sur-Seine on the outskirts of Paris. Her mother, Georgette, from whom she acquired her stage name, was a French Catholic.

Signoret grew up in Paris in an intellectual atmosphere and studied English, German and Latin. After completing secondary school during the Nazi occupation, Simone was responsible for supporting her family and forced to take work as a typist for a French collaborationist newspaper, Les nouveaux temps, run by Jean Luchaire.

Career

During the occupation of France, Signoret mixed with an artistic group of writers and actors who met at the Café de Flore in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés quarter. By this time, she had developed an interest in acting and was encouraged by her friends, including her lover, Daniel Gélin, to follow her ambition. In 1942, she began appearing in bit parts and was able to earn enough money to support her mother and two brothers as her father, who was a French patriot, had fled the country in 1940 to join General De Gaulle in England. She took her mother's maiden name for the screen to help hide her Jewish roots.

Signoret's sensual features and earthy nature led to type-casting and she was often seen in roles as a prostitute. She won considerable attention in La Ronde (1950), a film which was banned briefly in New York as immoral. She won further acclaim, including an acting award from the British Film Academy, for her portrayal of another prostitute in Jacques Becker's Casque d'or (1951). She appeared in many French films during the 1950s, including Thérèse Raquin (1953), directed by Marcel Carné, Les Diaboliques (1954), and The Crucible (Les Sorcières de Salem; 1956), based on Arthur Miller's The Crucible.

In 1958, Signoret acted in the English independent film, Room at the Top (1959), from which her emotionally powerful performance won her numerous awards including the Best Female Performance Prize at Cannes and the Academy Award for Best Actress. Not for nearly 40 years did another French actress receive an Oscar: Juliette Binoche (Supporting Actress, 1997) and Marion Cotillard (Best Actress, 2008). She was offered films in Hollywood, but turned them down for several years, continuing to work in France and England—for example, opposite Laurence Olivier in Term of Trial (1962). She earned a further Oscar nomination for her work on Ship of Fools (1965), and appeared in a few other Hollywood films before returning to France in 1969.

In 1962, Signoret translated Lillian Hellman's play The Little Foxes into French for a production in Paris that ran for six months at the Theatre Sarah-Bernhardt. She played the Regina role as well. Hellman was displeased with the production, although the translation was approved by scholars selected by Hellman.

Signoret's one attempt at Shakespeare, performing Lady Macbeth opposite Alec Guinness at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1966 proved to be ill-advised, with some harsh critics; one referred to her English as "impossibly Gallic".

Signoret was never concerned with glamour, ignored sexist and ageist insults and continued giving finely etched performances. She won more acclaim for her portrayal of a weary madam in Madame Rosa (1977) and as an unmarried sister who unknowingly falls in love with her paralyzed brother via anonymous correspondence in I Sent a Letter to my Love [fr] (1980). She continued to appear in many movies before her death in 1985.

Personal life

Signoret's memoirs, Nostalgia Isn't What It Used To Be, were published in 1978. She also wrote a novel, Adieu Volodya, published in 1985, the year of her death.

Signoret first married filmmaker Yves Allégret (1944–49), with whom she had a daughter Catherine Allégret, herself an actress. Her second marriage was to the Italian-born French actor Yves Montand in 1951, a union which lasted until her death; the couple had no children.

Signoret died of pancreatic cancer in Autheuil-Authouillet, France, aged 64. She was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris and Yves Montand was later buried next to her.

Additional Information

Simone Signoret, original name Simone Kaminker, (born March 25, 1921, Wiesbaden, Ger.—died Sept. 30, 1985, Eure, France), was a French actress known for her portrayal of fallen romantic heroines and headstrong older women. Her tumultuous marriage to actor Yves Montand and the couple’s championing of several left-wing causes often provoked controversy and brought her notoriety.

Born in Germany to French nationals, Signoret was reared from the age of two in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a suburb of Paris, where she led a sheltered middle-class existence. As a teenager she began to frequent the Café de Flore, a popular meeting place for leftist artists and intellectuals. There she befriended, among others, writer Jacques Prévert and film director Yves Allégret (whom she later married) and decided to become an actress. Unable to obtain an official work permit because her father was Jewish, she took her mother’s maiden name, Signoret, as her professional name and worked primarily as a motion picture extra during the Nazi occupation of France. After World War II she soon graduated to featured roles, typically portraying prostitutes and lovelorn young women in films such as Allégret’s Les Démons de l’aube (1945; “The Demons of Dawn”) and Macadam (1946). She became a star in France playing the title role, another sympathetic prostitute, in Allégret’s Dédée d’Anvers (1948; Dedee).

Signoret’s career took a significant detour in 1949 when she met Montand, for whom she eventually divorced Allégret. She married Montand in 1951 and began limiting her projects in order to spend more time with him. Among the films she accepted were Jacques Becker’s Casque d’or (1952; Golden Marie, “Golden Helmet”), a romantic love story in which she portrayed the title role with sensitivity, warmth, and passion, and Henri-Georges Clouzot’s classic suspense thriller Les Diaboliques (1955), in which she played a cool, murderous schoolteacher. She also branched out into the theatre, starring opposite Montand in 1954 and 1955 in an acclaimed Parisian production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (as well as in the 1957 film version, Les Sorcières du Salem [“The Witches of Salem”]).

Signoret secured her status as an international star with her intelligent, sensual portrayal of a jilted older woman in Room at the Top (1958), which won her numerous awards, including the British and American Academy Awards. After that success she appeared in a few Hollywood films but preferred working in France. In her later films, such as Le Chat (1971; The Cat) and La Vie devant soi (1977; Madame Rosa, “The Life in Front of You”), she often played a survivor whose battles were evident in her aging, beautifully ravaged face. She brought the same warmth and sincerity to these older characters that she had to her early roles as a radiant beauty, but she often received more attention for her decision not to conceal her age or glamorize her looks than for her actual performances.

Signoret published her autobiography, La Nostalgie n’est plus ce qu’elle était (Nostalgia Isn’t What It Used to Be), in 1976 and also wrote two popular novels, Le Lendemain, elle était souriante (1979; “The Next Day, She Was Smiling”) and Adieu Volodia (1985).

Jai Ganesh · 2023-06-13 22:04:11

1289) Elizabeth Taylor

Summary

Dame Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor (February 27, 1932 – March 23, 2011) was a British-American actress. She began her career as a child actress in the early 1940s and was one of the most popular stars of classical Hollywood cinema in the 1950s. She then became the world's highest paid movie star in the 1960s, remaining a well-known public figure for the rest of her life. In 1999, the American Film Institute named her the seventh-greatest female screen legend of Classic Hollywood cinema.

Born in London to socially prominent American parents, Taylor moved with her family to Los Angeles in 1939. She made her acting debut with a minor role in the Universal Pictures film There's One Born Every Minute (1942), but the studio ended her contract after a year. She was then signed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and became a popular teen star after appearing in National Velvet (1944). She transitioned to mature roles in the 1950s, when she starred in the comedy Father of the Bride (1950) and received critical acclaim for her performance in the drama A Place in the Sun (1951). She starred in the historical adventure epic Ivanhoe (1952) with Robert Taylor and Joan Fontaine. Despite being one of MGM's most bankable stars, Taylor wished to end her career in the early 1950s. She resented the studio's control and disliked many of the films to which she was assigned.

She began receiving more enjoyable roles in the mid-1950s, beginning with the epic drama Giant (1956), and starred in several critically and commercially successful films in the following years. These included two film adaptations of plays by Tennessee Williams: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959); Taylor won a Golden Globe for Best Actress for the latter. Although she disliked her role as a call girl in BUtterfield 8 (1960), her last film for MGM, she won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance. During the production of the film Cleopatra in 1961, Taylor and co-star Richard Burton began an extramarital affair, which caused a scandal. Despite public disapproval, they continued their relationship and were married in 1964. They starred in 11 films together, including The V.I.P.s (1963), The Sandpiper (1965), The Taming of the Shrew (1967), and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). Taylor received the best reviews of her career for Woolf, winning her second Academy Award and several other awards for her performance. She and Burton divorced in 1974 but reconciled soon after, remarrying in 1975. The second marriage ended in divorce in 1976.

Taylor's acting career began to decline in the late 1960s, although she continued starring in films until the mid-1970s, after which she focused on supporting the career of her sixth husband, United States Senator John Warner (R-Virginia). In the 1980s, she acted in her first substantial stage roles and in several television films and series. She became the second celebrity to launch a perfume brand after Sophia Loren. Taylor was one of the first celebrities to take part in HIV/AIDS activism. She co-founded the American Foundation for AIDS Research in 1985 and the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation in 1991. From the early 1990s until her death, she dedicated her time to philanthropy, for which she received several accolades, including the Presidential Citizens Medal. Throughout her career, Taylor's personal life was the subject of constant media attention. She was married eight times to seven men, converted to Judaism, endured several serious illnesses, and led a jet set lifestyle, including assembling one of the most expensive private collections of jewellery in the world. After many years of ill health, Taylor died from congestive heart failure in 2011, at the age of 79.

Details

Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor was considered one of the last, if not the last, major star to have come out of the old Hollywood studio system. She was known internationally for her beauty, especially for her violet eyes, with which she captured audiences early on in her youth and kept the world hooked on with since.

Taylor was born on February 27, 1932 in London, England. Although she was born an English subject, her parents, Sara Taylor (née Sara Viola Warmbrodt) and Francis Taylor, were Americans, art dealers from St. Louis, Missouri (her father had gone to London to set up a gallery). Her mother had been an actress on the stage, but gave up that vocation when she married. Elizabeth lived in London until the age of seven, when the family left for the US when the clouds of war began brewing in Europe in 1939. They sailed without her father, who stayed behind to wrap up the loose ends of the art business.

The family relocated to Los Angeles, where Mrs. Taylor's own family had moved. Mr. Taylor followed not long afterward. A family friend noticed the strikingly beautiful little Elizabeth and suggested that she be taken for a screen test. Her test impressed executives at Universal Pictures enough to sign her to a contract. Her first foray onto the screen was in There's One Born Every Minute (1942), released when she was ten. Universal dropped her contract after that one film, but Elizabeth was soon picked up by MGM.

The first production she made with that studio was Lassie Come Home (1943), and on the strength of that one film, MGM signed her for a full year. She had minuscule parts in her next two films, The White Cliffs of Dover (1944) and Jane Eyre (1943) (the former made while she was on loan to 20th Century-Fox). Then came the picture that made Elizabeth a star: MGM's National Velvet (1944). She played Velvet Brown opposite Mickey Rooney. The film was a smash hit, grossing over $4 million. Elizabeth now had a long-term contract with MGM and was its top child star. She made no films in 1945, but returned in 1946 in Courage of Lassie (1946), another success. In 1947, when she was 15, she starred in Life with Father (1947) with such heavyweights as William Powell, Irene Dunne and Zasu Pitts, which was one of the biggest box office hits of the year. She also co-starred in the ensemble film Little Women (1949), which was also a box office huge success.

Throughout the 1950s, Elizabeth appeared in film after film with mostly good results, starting with her role in the George Stevens film A Place in the Sun (1951), co-starring her good friend Montgomery Clift. The following year, she co-starred in Ivanhoe (1952), one of the biggest box office hits of the year. Her busiest year was 1954. She had a supporting role in the box office flop Beau Brummell (1954), but later that year starred in the hits The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954) and Elephant Walk (1954). She was 22 now, and even at that young age was considered one of the world's great beauties. In 1955 she appeared in the hit Giant (1956) with James Dean.

Sadly, Dean never saw the release of the film, as he died in a car accident in 1955. The next year saw Elizabeth co-star with Montgomery Clift in Raintree County (1957), an overblown epic made, partially, in Kentucky. Critics called it dry as dust. In addition, Clift was seriously injured during the film, with Taylor helping save his life. Despite the film's shortcomings and off-camera tragedy, Elizabeth was nominated for an Academy Award for her portrayal of Southern belle Susanna Drake. However, on Oscar night the honor went to Joanne Woodward for The Three Faces of Eve (1957).

In 1958 Elizabeth starred as Maggie Pollitt in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958). The film received rave reviews from the critics and Elizabeth was nominated again for an Academy Award for best actress, but this time she lost to Susan Hayward in I Want to Live! (1958). She was still a hot commodity in the film world, though. In 1959 she appeared in another mega-hit and received yet another Oscar nomination for Suddenly, Last Summer (1959). Once again, however, she lost out, this time to Simone Signoret for Room at the Top (1958). Her Oscar drought ended in 1960 when she brought home the coveted statue for her performance in BUtterfield 8 (1960) as Gloria Wandrous, a call girl who is involved with a married man. Some critics blasted the movie but they couldn't ignore her performance. There were no more films for Elizabeth for three years. She left MGM after her contract ran out, but would do projects for the studio later down the road. In 1963 she starred in Cleopatra (1963), which was one of the most expensive productions up to that time--as was her salary, a whopping $1,000,000. The film took years to complete, due in part to a serious illness during which she nearly died.

This was the film where she met her future and fifth husband, Richard Burton (the previous four were Conrad Hilton, Michael Wilding, Mike Todd--who died in a plane crash--and Eddie Fisher). Her next films, The V.I.P.s (1963) and The Sandpiper (1965), were lackluster at best. Elizabeth was to return to fine form, however, with the role of Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). Her performance as the loudmouthed, shrewish, unkempt, yet still alluring Martha was easily her finest to date. For this she would win her second Oscar and one that was more than well-deserved. The following year, she and Burton co-starred in The Taming of The Shrew (1967), again giving winning performances. However, her films afterward were box office failures, including Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), The Comedians (1967), Boom! (1968) (again co-starring with Burton), Secret Ceremony (1968), The Only Game in Town (1970), X, Y and Zee (1972), Hammersmith Is Out (1972) (with Burton again), Ash Wednesday (1973), Night Watch (1973), The Driver's Seat (1974), The Blue Bird (1976) (considered by many to be her worst), A Little Night Music (1977), and Winter Kills (1979) (a controversial film which was never given a full release and in which she only had a small role). Since then, she has appeared in some movies, both theatrical and made-for-television, and a number of television programs. In February 1997, Elizabeth entered the hospital for the removal of a brain tumor. The operation was successful. As for her private life, she divorced Burton in 1974, only to remarry him in 1975 and divorce him, permanently, in 1976. She had two more husbands, U.S. Senator John Warner and construction worker Larry Fortensky, whom she met in rehab.

In 1959, Taylor converted to Judaism, and continued to identify herself as Jewish throughout her life, being active in Jewish causes. Upon the death of her friend, actor Rock Hudson, in 1985, she began her crusade on the behalf of AIDS sufferers. In the 1990s, she also developed a successful series of scents. In her later years, her acting career was relegated to the occasional TV-movie or TV guest appearance.

Elizabeth Taylor died on March 23, 2011 in Los Angeles, from congestive heart failure. Her final resting place is Forest Lawn Memorial Park, in Glendale, California.

Additional Information

Elizabeth Taylor, in full Dame Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor, (born February 27, 1932, London, England—died March 23, 2011, Los Angeles, California, U.S.), was an American motion picture actress noted for her unique beauty and her portrayals of volatile and strong-willed characters.

Taylor’s American parents were residing in England at the time of her birth. Shortly before the outbreak of World War II, the family returned to the United States, settling in Los Angeles. Her father was an art dealer, and his business brought him into contact with members of the Hollywood elite. Though her mother, a former stage actress, initially balked at allowing the young Taylor to enter the film industry, an introduction to the chairman of Universal Pictures through one of her father’s clients led to a screen test. In 1942 Taylor made her first film, There’s One Born Every Minute. Though she was soon dropped by Universal, MGM Studios signed her to a contract and cast her in Lassie Come Home (1943). That was followed by a star-making performance in National Velvet (1944) as a young woman who rescues a horse and trains it to race.

Taylor made a smooth transition from juvenile to adult roles in the films Life with Father (1947), Father of the Bride (1950), and An American Tragedy (1951). She appeared as the frivolous wife of a writer in The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954) and as an East Coast woman who marries the patriarch of a disintegrating Texas ranching family (played by Rock Hudson) in Giant (1956). In Raintree County (1957), Taylor channeled a deracinated Southern belle who marries an abolitionist (Montgomery Clift). Her mature screen persona— that of a glamorous, passionate woman unafraid of expressing love and anger—was at its apogee in film adaptations of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959).

Taylor won an Academy Award for her performance as a conflicted New York call girl in Butterfield 8 (1960), though she publicly expressed her dislike of the film. She met and fell in love with the British actor Richard Burton while they were filming Cleopatra (1963). Both were still married at the time, and their affair became a scandal. The couple was hounded by photographers and denounced as immoral in forums as diverse as the Vatican newspaper and the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. The two ultimately divorced their respective spouses and were themselves married twice (1964–74, 1975–76).

Taylor won a second Academy Award for her performance opposite Burton as the vituperative but vulnerable Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), directed by Mike Nichols from the play by Edward Albee. She costarred with him again in an adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew (1967); the couple made five further films together. After the mid-1970s, however, Taylor appeared only intermittently in films, Broadway plays, and television films.

Taylor’s closely scrutinized personal life presaged the advent of the tabloid frenzy of the latter decades of the 20th century. Her eight marriages provided no shortage of fodder: among her husbands were film producer Michael Todd, singer Eddie Fisher, and U.S. Sen. John Warner. An active philanthropist, Taylor helped to establish the American Foundation for AIDS Research (1985), partly motivated by the death of her friend Rock Hudson from the disease. She traveled the world as spokeswoman for the organization and in 1991 established the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation to provide direct services to those suffering from the disease. Taylor also used the allure of her public image to market lucrative perfume and costume jewelry lines. In 1993 she received the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award. She received the French Legion of Honour in 1987 and was made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 2000.

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