Californian Gloria Grahame (1923-1981) had a short, emotional life.
During the second half of the 40s, she came to conquer Hollywood, she was Violet Bick in Frank Capra's 'How beautiful it is to Live', considered one of the 100 best American films in history, and already with her third job she was nominated to the Oscar of the Academy as a best secondary actress that she would get thanks to her performance in 'captives of evil' by Vincente Minnelli.
She is currently considered one of the most memorable fatal Women in film noir thanks to her appearance in more than 10 films of the genre, however, in the mid-50s, she fell into oblivion and practically abandoned the cinema. Her professional life was marked by a very unstable personal life with several sc@nd@ls for which the industry and the public would punish her. In reality, it is not known how much truth there is in all the stories that she is supposed to star in, what is clear is that she was an actress unfairly mistreated by the system simply because she did not follow the established rules.
Widespread beliefs about Gloria Grahame
Grahame's grandfather, British artist Reginald Francis Hallward, is said to have been the inspiration for the character Basil in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Gloria Hallward left high school in Hollywood early to pursue her dream of becoming an artist. She assumed her mother's stage name, Grahame, and worked in theater until Luis B. Mayer saw her perform on Broadway and signed her to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
In her mid-40s she began a series of cosmetic operations to address some of her insecurities with her appearance. In the year 1952, she underwent an operation in Germany that paralyzed her upper lip. To camouflage the fact that her speech was seriously impaired, she began putting tissue paper under her upper lip and she was callously called "the girl with the Novocain lip".
In 1952, at just 29 years old, she won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for "Captives of Evil." When at the ceremony, after hearing her name, she went up on stage to her for the statuette, she simply managed to say 'Thank you very much' and she left the stage leaving everyone present surprised. For that simple gesture, many theories about her drunken state were fed, although she, seeing the images, seemed to only be visibly nervous and intoxicated by the situation.
Her love life was a constant blunder, she chained four husbands with whom she had four children in stormy marriages. Two of her husbands were father and son, a great sc@nd@ls that happened in 1951 and that would mark her public image as well as her future career. Her second husband, Nicholas Ray, the famous director of 'Rebel Without a Cause', found her in bed in her Malibu house with Tony, her 13-year-old son from her first marriage, which had just ended. back from military school. The tsunami of gossip that the quote generated would only be topped nine years later when Ella Grahame married Tony with whom she had two children. They were the most peaceful 14 years of any of her four marriages.
In the 1960s, Gloria Grahame remained very active in the theater, back in her mother's England. She practically abandoned the cinema, but not television, one of the second-rate refuges very popular with old glories of old golden Hollywood, working for example in the miniseries 'Rich Man, poor man'.
In 1973 she worked under the orders of Jose Maria Forque in the film 'Tarot' together with Fernando Rey and Sue Lyon (the protagonist of 'Lolita' by Stanley Kubrick). Despite having Hollywood stars and a script by Rafael Azcona, the Spanish film did not have the desired result.
The film 'Movie stars don't Die in Liverpool' was recently released in theaters, a beautiful tribute to the figure of Gloria Grahame that recreates a short stage in her life in which she falls in love with a young Londoner named Peter Turner. A love story that is cut short by complications from cancer that she suffered and that forced Gloria to leave the young man and her family in Liverpool and return to the United States to die hours after getting off the plane.
Gloria Grahame had the misfortune of succeeding in McCarthyism's Hollywood, a tremendously macho and retrograde era. Her outsider personality would immediately draw the attention of all those, many at the time, who hated those who were different.
