Turner found Grahame mesmerizing and yet vulnerable; she found a caring partner she badly needed. There’s no “better” or “worse”, rather the writers were making a value judgement. Then, in a flight of reverse culture shock, Grahame took Turner to California, to her  idyllically sited trailer in Santa Monica in a park overlooking the ocean, and then to New York where everyone from her building’s doormen to the cab drivers still treated her as royalty. For years she reigned as … Amazon.com: It's a Wonderful Life: Beulah Bondi, Gloria Grahame, Donna Reed, Lionel Barrymore, James Stewart, Frank Cappa: Movies & TV Annette Bening gives Gloria Grahame a nobility rarely shown to faded Hollywood actresses in “Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool,” a tender if generic portrait of aged glamour. Like Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts, Bening has been able to fearlessly carry pictures as the lead as she passes into middle age without avoiding close-ups or resorting to misted lenses. Of course, the age difference shocked some people in a way that revived gossip about the original 1951 scandal – even though her eventual marriage to Ray’s son Tony was the most enduring of her four marriages, from 1960 until 1974. Grahame attended Hollywood High School before dropping out to pursue acting.[1]. Grahame starred with Humphrey Bogart in the film In a Lonely Place (1950) for Columbia Pictures, a performance for which she gained praise. She achieved her highest profile with Sudden Fear (1952), The Big Heat (1953), Human Desire (1954), and Oklahoma! Choosing instead to continue working, she traveled to the United Kingdom to appear in a play. This portrait was used to promote Grahame's role in the 1946 Hollywood classic, It's a Wonderful Life. Despite her failing health, Grahame continued working in stage productions in the United States and the United Kingdom. Several co-stars discovered this during kissing scenes. Violet’s (Gloria Grahame, The Bad and the Beautiful) sins are self-evident. Hollywood purported to be shocked, shocked! From 1979 to 1981, Grahame had a relationship with Peter Turner. He contacted her family in America and one of her sons flew to Liverpool. In the episode of that series titled "The Guests", Grahame plays a forgotten film star living in the past. [20], News of the marriage was kept private until 1962, when it was written about in the tabloids and the ensuing scandal damaged Grahame's reputation and affected her career. It's a Wonderful Life … She received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress for Crossfire (1947).[4]. Still unaware of how seriously ill she was, Turner agreed and Grahame was given a bedroom and 24-hour family care. It went into remission less than a year later and Grahame returned to work. Though today it is considered among her finest performances, it was not a box-office hit, and Howard Hughes, owner of RKO, admitted that he never saw it. Grahame, in her run as the unsurpassed vamp of noir, was partnered with a string of the male masters of the genre, including Humphrey Bogart, Kirk Douglas, Sterling Hayden and Robert Mitchum. The strange life of the actress who played Violet Bick in the Christmas Classic “It’s a Wonderful Life”. If the movie is to be believed, it gave Grahame one valedictory embrace that cuts to the soul. As George is about to jump from a bridge, he ends up rescuing his guardian angel, Clarence. [30], The motion picture Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool, based on Peter Turner's account of the final years of her life, was released in the United Kingdom on November 16, 2017, and in the United States on December 29, 2017. Amen to her, COPYRIGHT 2020 By TheLifeandTimesofHollywood.com, Stories From The Life and Times of Hollywood. [28] Grahame had kept an apartment at the New York City complex Manhattan Plaza. Others saw her as a beautiful person, but she never did, and crazy things spread from that. MGM was not able to develop her potential as a star, and her contract was sold to RKO Studios in 1947. All that is long gone. Grahame also returned to Britain, without making contact with Turner, and resumed working in the theater in other northern cities, as though finding comfort in obscurity. They traveled to Liverpool, deciding to take their mother back to the United States, against the wishes of Grahame, her doctor, and Turner. [26], Peter Turner informed two of Grahame's children, Timothy and Marianna, who were in the United States, of her illness. They married in August 1954 and had a daughter, Marianna Paulette in 1956. After several separations and reconciliations, Grahame and Ray divorced in 1952. Gloria Grahame Hallward (November 28, 1923 – October 5, 1981), known professionally as Gloria Grahame, was an American stage, film, and television actress and singer.She began her acting career in theatre, and in 1944 made her first film for MGM.. It's a Wonderful Life (1946) - Gloria Grahame as Violet - IMDb It's a Wonderful Life (1946) She underwent radiation treatment, changed her diet, stopped smoking and drinking alcohol, and also sought homeopathic remedies. Grahame, in Bening’s hands, breaks free of the tabloid-fed stigma of the scandal in a daring way, suggesting not a predator but a libertine unrestrained by humbug. He was hurt. In 1979 she was appearing in a London theater production of The Glass Menagerie. Well, that's art direction after the fact, and an obvious kind of visual pun that Frank Capra never would have considered. They divorced in June 1948. As the angels discuss George, we see his life in flashback. Turner contacted the last doctor to have treated her and was stunned to comprehend that she had very little time left to live. Her other memorable roles included the scheming Irene Neves in Sudden Fear (also 1952), the femme fatale Vicki Buckley in Human Desire (1953), and mob moll Debby Marsh in Fritz Lang's The Big Heat (1953) in which, in a horrifying off-screen scene, she is scarred by hot coffee thrown in her face by Lee Marvin's character. [27], She was survived also by her sister, and both of her nonagenarian parents. Grahame was born in Los Angeles, California. No one gave more than George Bailey. Her remains were interred in Oakwood Memorial Park Cemetery in Chatsworth, Los Angeles. In the late 1970s, after decades of hard times, Liverpool was a hotbed of far left politics and remained an outlier, more polyglot than any other city outside London. Gloria Hallward, an acting pupil of her mother (stage actress and teacher Jean Grahame), acted professionally while still in high school. She later underwent electroshock therapy in 1964. 1937), the son of her second husband Nicholas Ray and his first wife Jean Evans; Anthony Ray was her former stepson. George Bailey has so many problems he is thinking about ending it all -- and it's Christmas! In the course of it, Bening conveys the sense that for women sexual physicality does not diminish with age any more than it does for men. Grahame had an affair with her leading man Glenn Ford during the filming of Human Desire in 1954.[22]. When I saw the film at a press preview among a bunch of bad-ass critics there was hardly a dry eye in the house. It was the kind of intense, focused drama that Broccoli wanted to make to prove her chops as an independent producer outside of the blockbuster business. Though h… And yet it does not break her. In the movie Grahame’s conquest of Turner is swift. Meanwhile, suprisingly early in her career, Grahame played what has become her most widely known role, that of Bedford Falls’ scarlet woman Violet in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). Grahame returned to work on the stage, but continued to appear in films and television productions, usually in supporting roles. The Byrd Theatre Foundation, the owner of the Byrd, was established in 2007 as a 501(c)(3) not-for- profit corporation. She never gave an inch in toughness while remaining irresistibly lubricious. What followed is not unusual in the movie business when a story can sometimes linger years waiting for an alignment of the stars. In 1974, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Actress. After learning of her marriage to Anthony Ray, Grahame's third husband, Cy Howard, attempted to gain sole custody of the couple's daughter, Marianna. The film stars James Stewart as George Bailey, a man who has given up his … (1955), but her film career began to wane soon afterwards. He returned to Liverpool where, as a member of the repertory at the Liverpool Playhouse he was beginning to make a career for himself. From the Daily Beast by Clive Irving comes this fascinating article: LONDON—Occasionally, not only men are disgraced in Hollywood. In March 1974, Grahame was diagnosed with breast cancer. According to Turner's book Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool, his local family doctor told Grahame she had a cancerous tumor in her abdomen "the size of a football". A Blonde trail-blazer rocked by scandal, validated with an … But over and above the intimate narrative is the enveloping presence of Liverpool, a city that is by instinct far more magnanimous than Hollywood. She was often featured in film noir pictures as a tarnished beauty with an irresistible sexual allure. It was in New York that her doctors told her that the cancer had returned, aggressively, this time to her stomach. He was 28,  she was 55. Eventually Colin Vaines, another British producer, who had always wanted to make the film, told Broccoli that he thought that Bening was the obvious choice to take the role and so, in 2016, the two of them finally made the movie happen, albeit with a very tight budget. This once great port city persisted not just as a city but a distinctive and rough-hewn culture with its own accent, scouse, as spoken by scousers – a word derived from a cheap stew once a staple of seafarers. She began stuffing cotton or tissues under it, which she felt gave her a sexier look. It seems ludicrous, on the face of it, that the role that Grahame coveted above all others that she never got to play was Shakespearean: as Juliet. She died in the hospital a few hours after admittance, at the age of 57. It's a Wonderful Life is a 1946 American Christmas family fantasy drama film produced and directed by Frank Capra, based on the short story and booklet The Greatest Gift, which Philip Van Doren Stern self-published in 1943 and is in turn loosely based on the Charles Dickens novel "A Christmas Carol". )[17][18] However, Grahame's former partner and biographer, Peter Turner, has disputed this, saying that the story of Tony being underage when Grahame began her sexual relationship with him is "fiction". Feb 3, 2019 - Explore jamie richie's board "girl - gloria grahame - It's a Wonderful Life" on Pinterest. Her first marriage was to actor Stanley Clements in August 1945. Its resurrection would be almost as strange as its creation. [27], After staying for six days at the home of Turner's mother, Grahame was flown back to the United States by her two children on 5 October 1981; there she was immediately admitted to St. Vincent's Hospital in New York City. [21] Despite the surrounding scandal, Grahame's marriage to Anthony Ray was her only one, of four, to last well beyond four years (her marriage to his father lasted 4 years 2 months), as they did not divorce until a few days short of their 14th anniversary, in May 1974.[21]. When she asked to be lent out for roles in Born Yesterday (also 1950) and A Place in the Sun (1951), Hughes refused and instead made her perform a supporting role in Macao (1952). She was also a practicing Catholic but the two women of such different backgrounds bonded easily – Bella was shrewd enough to sense that Grahame was being kept whole only by believing in little more than her own allure – sustained by her son’s adoration. Indeed, the film opens with an extended and unforgiving close-up of Grahame at work on her face in the mirror in the dressing room of a dowdy provincial theater. MGM was not able to develop her potential as a star, and her contract was sold to RKO Studios in 1947. Grahame's career began to wane after her performance in the musical film Oklahoma! According to her niece, Vicky Mitchum, Grahame's obsession with her looks led her to undergo more cosmetic procedures that rendered her upper lip largely immobile because of nerve damage. Early in October, 1981, she was flown to New York and, within hours of being admitted to hospital, died at the age of 57. In autumn 1981, while performing at The Dukes Playhouse[24] in Lancaster, England, Grahame was taken ill. Grahame made her film debut in Blonde Fever (1944) and then achieved one of her most widely praised roles as the flirtatious Violet Bick, saved from disgrace by George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life (1946). [2] Her English father, Reginald Michael Bloxam Hallward (known as Michael Hallward; 1889-1982) was an architect and author; her Scottish mother, Jean (or Jeanne) McDougall, who used the stage name Jean Grahame (1890–1984), was a British stage actress and acting teacher. The deeper context was Liverpool. Liverpool provides the final hiding place – in the Turner home the kitchen has the warmth of a womb, with Julie Walters as the ministering Bella. Despite a featured role in It's a Wonderful Life (1946), MGM did not believe she had the potential for major success, and sold … But she did not live like the star she had been with a suite in the Savoy – she had a room in a humble theatrical boarding house. Grahame made her film debut in Blonde Fever (1944) and then achieved one of her most widely praised roles as the flirtatious Violet Bick, saved from disgrace by George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life (1946). She also guest-starred in television series, including the science-fiction series The Outer Limits. Bening’s partner as Turner is Jamie Bell, reminding us of his breakthrough performance as a dancer in Billy Elliot but now matured as exactly the kind of actor the role needed. Turner told this story in a sensitive memoir, Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool, published in 1986. But by the 1970s her career had gone into a long slide, though she was still working. See reviews & details on a wide selection of Blu-ray & DVDs. [9], Over time, Grahame became increasingly concerned with her physical appearance; she particularly felt her upper lip was too thin and had ridges that were too deep. In a weak but clear voice Grahame reads her lines from Romeo and Juliet to Turner’s Romeo. She began her acting career in theatre and in 1944 made her first film for MGM. [29], For her contribution to the motion picture industry, Gloria Grahame has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6522 Hollywood Boulevard. 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