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(#9) Barbara La Marr
- Dec. at 30 (1896-1926)
Silent movie star Barbara La Marr made just 27 films over the course of her short career. She isn't as well known as her contemporaries, but her story is just as compelling. Born Reatha Dale Watson in Yakima, WA, she came to Hollywood riveted by the desire "to be a great tragedienne and wield a dagger."
According to LA Weekly, La Marr, whom a judge once described as "too beautiful to be in a big city,” started out seeking fame by traveling across the country with her second husband. She eventually left him to marry her third spouse, "a dancer and check forger." Eventually, she made it to Hollywood, and was noticed by Douglas Fairbanks. She subsequently:
"became... famous for her wild love life (she left [her husband] in 1921) and her dramatic, liberated bon mots, which titillated the lost generation of flappers and philosophers. 'I take lovers like roses... by the dozen,' she said. 'I cheat nature. I never sleep more than two hours per night. I have better things to do... one loves to live only because one lives to love.”
Eventually, though, her luck ran out. She died, possibly of tuberculosis, at 29, and was thereafter dubbed "screenland's beautiful lady of sorrow."
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(#5) Clara Bow
- Dec. at 60 (1905-1965)
Silent film "It" girl Clara Bow was one of cinema's first starlets, and one of its most luridly famous ones. As this piece in The Hairpin puts it, "when she retired in 1931 amid a tangle of scandals, she was all of 28 years old." Yet, most of the "scandals" that developed around her name and persona came from fallouts associated with old-fashioned romanticism, which Bow believed in as much as anybody. As the article puts it:
"like many female stars of the time [Bow] treated the boyfriends that she (most likely) slept with as 'engagements.' This led to a series of quickly formed and broken 'engagements' to the likes of Gary Cooper... the director Victor Fleming, and 'Latin Lover' Gilbert Roland. When she had a 'case of nerves' in the late ’20s, she was treated by a Hollywood doctor. She developed a crush on the doctor... when the doctor’s wife sued for divorce, she named Bow as cause for 'alienation of affection.' No good."
No good, but perhaps unjust. There were other scandals that rocked Bow too, most notoriously the accusation that she'd slept with the entire USC football team. Bow was also screwed over by her secretary, who stole her personal records and then attempted to blackmail the actress in court by alleging all manner of "constant drunkenness [and] hook-ups."
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(#2) Vivien Leigh
- Dec. at 54 (1913-1967)
Best known for (splendidly) bringing both Scarlett O'Hara and Blanche DuBois to life, Vivien Leigh was also known for her intensity and her beauty. But success - and her notoriously volatile marriage to Sir Laurence Olivier - didn't come easily, or ethically. According to one of the many documentaries made about her, Leigh
"Went to see [Laurence Olivier] in a play, and declared, 'that's the man I'm going to marry.' And a friend of hers who was with her had to point out 'well, actually you're already married.' But this was all part of this ruthless ambition... people were to be cast by the wayside in those early days, until she achieved what she really wanted."
Olivier, too, was already married, but that didn't stop Leigh from following him and his wife to where they were vacationing in Capri. Leigh and Olivier hooked up, despite the fact that his spouse, actress Jill Esmond, was pregnant. The less-than-virtuous Olivier gave her the boot, and married Leigh soon after.
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(#3) Tallulah Bankhead
- Dec. at 66 (1902-1968)
Beautiful, rebellious, witty, and not afraid to occasionally alienate people by speaking her mind, Tallulah Bankhead was a one-of-a-kind sex symbol. Actor-writer Emlyn Williams described her voice as "steeped as deep in sex as the human voice can go without drowning," and her appetites were legion. One of many memorable anecdotes, as recounted by The New Yorker, involved:
"a second-rank actor named John Emery, whom Tallulah had picked up on the summer circuit and, rather casually, married. Emery was good-looking, capable, and amiable. Best of all, he bore a marked resemblance to John Barrymore, and not only in profile: years earlier, when Barrymore revealed himself to her in his dressing room, Tallulah had sworn to herself (and anyone within earshot) never to sleep with any man who wasn’t 'hung like Barrymore,' and went on to claim that she had stuck to her word. (Since she also claimed five hundred or more conquests, perhaps she wasn’t always so picky.) One of Tallulah’s party tricks was to escort guests to the master bedroom, fling back the covers from the bed in which Emery was sleeping, and crow, 'Did you ever see a prick as big as that before?'”
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(#6) Louise Brooks
- Dec. at 79 (1906-1985)
Louise Brooks had an extraordinarily brief, but impactful, film career. She hated Hollywood, seeking instead to build a haven (as this Pop Matters piece memorably puts it) out of "sex, books, and gin."
Brooks did, however, like to have a good time. She left her first husband, director Eddie Sutherland, after she fell in love with George Preston Marshall, owner of the Washington Redskins. She then left Marshall to marry someone else, whom she then left after less than six months. Brooks also had many lovers - including, for a night, Greta Garbo - and frequently posed nude.
It was all short-lived, though: Brooks's life in film was over by the time she was 26. But, though her subsequent poverty caused a lot of problems, she never really regretted leaving the limelight.
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(#8) Diana Dors
- Dec. at 53 (1931-1984)
With her ostentatious mansion, kitschy decadence, and debauched parties, British cult actress Diana Dors was the definition of notorious. Dors was married three times, had numerous lovers, and was rather quaintly called "a wayward hussy" by the Archbishop of Canterbury. She was famous not just for starring in low-budget films, but for filming people having sex in her house. According to sources:
"to whoops and laughter, [Dors's guests] watched grainy footage, transmitted via video-link, of an unsuspecting couple who had chosen to cavort in one of the dimly-lit upstairs bedrooms... it’s fair to say that pretty much anything was acceptable during the infamous sex parties staged at Orchard Manor in Sunningdale, Berkshire."
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Where is the largest star-making factory in the world? It is Hollywood, dreams can become a reality there. In the golden age of Hollywood, a large number of world-class actresses were raise in the last century. Even today, elegance, gorgeousness, and genius are still the simplest, but also the most accurate vocabularies we can think of to praise them.
Old Hollywood was the golden age of these superstars. Even though some gorgeous actresses have short careers in Hollywood, they are still regarded as charming legends. The random tool lists 10 awesome Old Hollywood actresses you must have heard of their names.
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