Gloria grahame last photo
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Gloria Grahame
ByDonald Chasein the September-October 1997 Issue
Not long before she died in 1981 at age 57, Gloria Grahame, who had acted in films signed by Frank Capra, Nicholas Ray, Josef von Sternberg, Vincente Minnelli, Elia Kazan, Fritz Lang, and Fred Zinnemann, demolished them all in one sweeping statement. “Those men never directed me,” she told an English stage director with whom she was currently working. “I’d go home and work on it with my mother, then come in and shoot it, and that would be that.” If she gave credit to anyone other than her mother, a Shakespearean actress-become-Los Angeles-drama coach, it was to Bill Watts, her dialogue director on the 1947 Crossfire. A dialogue director's job is to learn lines with actors, presumably in accordance with a director’s interpretive notions, but this one apparently did much more with Grahame. Watts, she told the Brit entertainment mag Time Out in 1978, “first made me realize how to play movies. It’s thinking... All he did was talk to me about who the character was, where she was, what she was, unti
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Gloria Grahame
American actress (1923–1981)
This article is about the American actress. For the American artist, see Gloria Graham.
Gloria Grahame (born Gloria Penelope Hallward; November 28, 1923 – October 5, 1981) was an American actress. She began her acting career in theater, and in 1944 made her first film for MGM.[2] Many biographies indicate she was born Gloria Grahame Hallward, but she adopted the surname Grahame, her mother's acting name, as her professional name.[3]
Despite a featured role in It's a Wonderful Life (1946), MGM did not believe she had the potential for major success and sold her contract to RKO. Often cast in film noir projects, Grahame was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Crossfire (1947), and later won the award for her work in The Bad and the Beautiful (1952). After starring opposite Humphrey Bogart in In a Lonely Place (1950), she achieved her highest profile with Sudden Fear (1952), The Big Heat (1953), Human Desire (1954), and Oklahoma! (1955), but her film career began to wa
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Gloria Grahame Hallward, an acting pupil of her mother (stage actress and teacher Jean Grahame), acted professionally while still in high school. In 1944 Louis B. Mayer saw her on Broadway and gave her an MGM contract under the name Gloria Grahame. Her debut in the title role of Blonde Fever (1944) was auspicious, but her first public recognition came on loan-out in It's a Wonderful Life (1946). Although her talent and sex appeal were of star quality, she did not fit the star pattern at MGM, who sold her contract to RKO in 1947. Here the same problem resurfaced; her best film in these years was made on loan-out, In a Lonely Place (1950). Soon after, she left RKO. The 1950s, her best period, brought her a Best Supporting Actress Oscar and typecast her as shady, inimitably sultry ladies in seven well-known film-noir classics.
Rumors of being difficult to work with on the set of Oklahoma! (1955) helped sideline her film career from 1956 onward. She also suffered from marital and child-custody troubles. Eight years after divorce from Nicholas Ray, who was 12 years her senior (a
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