Jeanne Eagels: A Life Revealed – the first biography of the legendary actress to be published in 85 years, which tells ‘the tragic story of the beautiful, Academy Award-nominated film and Broadway star’ – has been named among the Best Film Books of 2015 by historian Thomas Gladysz, in his annual round-up for the Huffington Post.

Fay Okell Bainter was born in Los Angeles on December 7, 1893. Encouraged by her mother, Fay first went on the stage aged six, and joined Oliver Morosco’s travelling stock company before making her Broadway debut at seventeen. Unfortunately, her early roles failed to make an impact, and she had no choice but to resume the gruelling life of a touring player. In 1916, she returned to New York in a hit play, Arms and the Girl, followed by The Willow Tree (1917) and The Kiss Burglar (1918.)

That year, legendary theatrical producer David Belasco offered Fay a place in his prestigious company, alongside the likes of Ina Claire and Jeanne Eagels. In December, Fay opened in East is West, playing Ming Toy, a young woman struggling to assert herself within a traditional Oriental family. Running for 680 performances before closing in 1920, it was her greatest success to date.

Portrait by Robert Henri (1918)

On February 23, 1919, Fay performed with Eagels, Marie Dressler, Cecil Cunningham and Helen Hayes in George Hobart’s Rough Perfect at the Belasco Theatre, as part of the Carry On benefit organised by Stage Women War Relief.

Eagels left Belasco’s roster, but joined the Actors Fidelity League – an ‘anti-union union’ – that August, during a long dispute between Broadway’s most powerful producers and Actors Equity. Bainter was another member, but Equity finally prevailed.

In 1920, Fay married Reginald Venable, a lieutenant commander in the US Navy. She continued acting, in The Lady Cristilinda (1922), The Other Rose (1923), and The Dream Girl (1924.) She also participated in a March 1924 benefit performance at the Music Box Theatre, alongside Jeanne Eagels, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Alexander Woollcott, W.C. Fields, and Irving Berlin. The glitzy event raised nearly $4,000 for the American Humane Association, who proclaimed it “a brilliant social and theatrical success.”

On August 28, 1925, every American newspaper devoted its front page to the previous night’s wedding of Jeanne Eagels and Edward Harris ‘Ted’ Coy, in Stamford, Connecticut. The wedding was held at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Reginald Venable. Reginald acted as best man for Coy, and his mother, Theresa Venable, was Jeanne’s attendant.

“Her marriage to Mr. Coy at the home of Fay Bainter does not surprise me at all,” Jeanne’s mother, Julia, told reporters by telephone from her home in Kansas City. “Fay and Jeanne have been the closest of friends for years.”

Fay went on to appear in and The Enemy (1925.) Her only son, Reginald Jr., was born in 1926. In 1927, she played Julia Sterroll in the original Broadway production of Noel Coward’s Fallen Angels, and starred as Kate Hardcastle in a revival of Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer in 1928.

John Halliday with Fay Bainter in ‘Jealousy’ (1929)

Jeanne Eagels had hoped to star in Louis Verneuil’s play, Jealousy, but the part went to Fay instead. In May 1928, Jeanne was banned from the legitimate stage for eighteen months, after a dispute with Equity. In August, her divorce from Ted Coy was finalised.

By the time Fay opened in Jealousy that October, Eagels was reviving her film career. In February 1929, as Fay’s successful run in Jealousy came to an end, it was announced that Paramount had purchased it for Jeanne. The film was released on September 16, less than three weeks before Eagels died.

Jeanne Eagels with Fredric March in ‘Jealousy’ (1929)

Fay’s next role was as Lady Mary Lasenby in a 1931 revival of J.M. Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton, followed by William Congreve’s The Way of the World, and an adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1933. Perhaps her greatest theatrical triumph was in Dodsworth (1934), opposite Walter Huston.

That year, Fay made her screen debut in This Side of Heaven, opposite Lionel Barrymore. In 1937, she starred alongside Katharine Hepburn in Quality Street. Bainter was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Actress in White Banners (1938), but won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar instead, for her unforgettable role as Bette Davis’s stern Aunt Belle in Jezebel.

Fay Bainter with Bette Davis in ‘Jezebel’ (1938)

She played kindly, maternal roles in Babes on Broadway (1941), Woman of the Year (1942), Presenting Lily Mars (1943), and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947.) During the 1950s and ’60s, she worked in television, and appeared in a touring production of A Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Her final film role was as Amelia Tilford in The Children’s Hour (1961), one of the least sympathetic characters she ever played.

Fay Bainter died of pneumonia in Los Angeles on April 16, 1968. She is buried at Arlington National Cemetery alongside her husband, who passed in 1964.

After his great performances in W.E., Inside Llewyn Davis and The Two Faces of January, Oscar Isaac is fast becoming my favourite contemporary actor. He has gone from strength to strength in 2015, with big and small-screen gems set in 1980s New York: A Most Violent Year, about an ambitious businessman trying to stay on the right side of the law; and Show Me a Hero, an HBO mini-series telling the true story of Nick Wasicsko, who became mayor of Yonkers during a bitterly divisive public housing crisis.

Young actresses shone in independent film this year, with Sameena Jabeen Ahmed making her debut in Catch Me Daddy, an edgy British thriller about a young Muslim girl on the run from a forced marriage; and a fragile but radiant Elle Fanning in Low Down, about the troubled relationship between jazz pianist Joe Albany (played by John Hawkes) and his teenage daughter, set in 1970s L.A.

Two very different, and brilliant TV shows that I’ve followed from the outset finally bowed out; Mad Men, and This is England.

I also enjoyed Inherent Vice, the darkly funny adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s hippie gumshoe novel; Listen Up Philip, a whimsical satire on New York’s literati; Macbeth, especially Marion Cotillard’s unusual take on Lady M; the music documentary, Amy; and the UK nationwide reissue of The Misfits, as part of the BFI’s Marilyn Monroe retrospective.

I’m still hoping to catch the re-release of another great 1960s movie, Doctor Zhivago. My favourite rediscovery this year was Dulcima (1971), a rural tragi-comedy based on a novella by H.E. Bates, and starring Sir John Mills and Carol White.

Over Christmas I’ll be watching You Made Me Love You, a 1936 British comedy starring Stanley Lupino and Thelma Todd; Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970) and Claudia Weill’s Girlfriends (1978), both listed among Sight & Sound magazine’s list of the 100 most important films made by women.

And in 2016 I’ll be looking out for Todd Haynes’ Carol; Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight; The Keeping Room, The Witch, and maybe even Angelina Jolie’s much-maligned By the Sea.

Reading Clarice Lispector for the first time is like falling in love. Each of her stories is a rare jewel. Shocking, funny and wildly imaginative, this collection is a landmark, reclaiming her as one of the underrated voices of the twentieth century.

The final volume in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series rages like a cyclone. No happy endings here, only the transcendence of real art.

Lucia Berlin was a wonderful American writer, whose stories are warm, yet unflinching. She led an eventful life, and while there are strong autobiographical elements in her work, she was also richly imaginative.

A hugely entertaining take on the rise and fall of Lucky Luciano. As with Hard Twisted, C. Joseph Greaves explores the criminal underworld of Depression-hit America in the 1930s.

If you enjoyed Bad Penny Blues, you’ll love this. Cathi Unsworth delves into the case of the ‘Blackout Ripper’, evoking wartime London and the underworld with great skill.

With access to files from the Blue Book Modelling Agency, Michelle Morgan revisits a relatively untroubled period in the future Marilyn Monroe’s life. Beautifully written and presented, a must-have for dedicated fans.

A little gem of a book, which adds to the legend of Bobbie Gentry – and her unforgettable Ode to Billie Joe – without displacing the essential mystery.

The genesis of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights – and its mysterious anti-hero, Heathcliff – form a background to this modern tale of a mixed-race boy and his mother. Caryl Phillips convincingly depicts the lingering prejudices of a changing Britain in the 1960s and 70s.

Stewart O’Nan reimagines F. Scott Fitzgerald’s final, humiliating years as a scribe for hire in Hollywood. Without denying his self-destructive streak, West of Sunset restores dignity to the fate of a ‘forgotten man.’

Novel based on the true story of a gang of Brazilian bandits in the early 20th century. Victoria Shorr brings both the romantic myth and harsh reality to light, and the ending, though not unexpected, is both thrilling and tragic.

Suspense novel set in 1960s New England, with shades of Patricia Highsmith and Shirley Jackson, and dark humour offsetting the gloom.

Honourable mention goes to Go Set a Watchman, Harper Lee’s rediscovered first manuscript; The Followers, Rebecca Wait’s novel about a religious cult casting a shadow over the Yorkshire moors; and The Ipswich Witch, historian David L. Jones’ study of mass hysteria on the eve of civil war.

Among my rediscoveries this year were Alberto Moravia’s 1929 debut, The Time of Indifference, telling the tale of a dysfunctional family in fascist Italy; and Fires in the Dark (2003), Louise Doughty’s novel of the Roma holocaust.

This Christmas I’ll be reading Matthew Rettenmund’s rebooted fan bible, Encyclopedia Madonnica 20; and Marilyn in the Flash, David Wills’ sequel to MM: Metamorphosis.

John Colton was born in Minneapolis on December 31, 1887. He spent his first fourteen years in Japan, where his English father was a diplomat. This early experience of colonial life in the Far East would inspire his writing.
After returning to the US, Colton became a drama critic for the Minneapolis Daily News in 1911.

In 1916, Colton moved to New York to write for Every Week magazine. Shortly afterwards, he was called to serve with the National Guard during the ‘Punitive Expedition’, and spent nine months on the Mexican border under General Pershing’s command. When America entered World War I in 1917, Colton’s poor eyesight disqualified him from active service.

By 1919, Colton was writing plots for motion pictures, starting with two shorts: The She Wolf and The Girl of Hell’s Agony, both Westerns, starring nightclub hostess Texas Guinan. In All Dolled Up (1921), Gladys Walton played a flapper who comes to the aid of Florence Turner, the ‘Vitagraph Girl.’

Colton’s first Broadway play, Drifting, was co-written with D.H. Andrews. Produced by W.A. Brady, it ran for sixty-three performances at the Playhouse Theatre in early 1922, starring Brady’s daughter, Alice as an American girl smuggling opium in China, with a supporting cast including Robert Warwick and a young Humphrey Bogart in his own Broadway debut. Drifting was filmed at Universal in 1923, with Priscilla Dean in the lead, alongside Wallace Beery and Anna May Wong. In 1929, it was remade with Mary Nolan as The Girl From China.

‘Miss Thompson’, W. Somerset Maugham’s short story about an American prostitute cast adrift on a storm-tossed South Sea island, caused a sensation when it was published in Smart Set magazine in 1921. Colton told the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in October 1926 that he had been staying at the same hotel as Maugham, and asked if he had anything for Colton to read. Maugham handed him the galleys of “Miss Thompson,” sent for proofing by Smart Set. The next morning, Colton asked if Maugham had considered turning his story into a play. As Maugham confirmed to Ward Morehouse in 1965, “I didn’t see a play in the story at all, but (John) Colton did. I told him go ahead with it if he so desired.”

H.L. Mencken, co-publisher of Smart Set, has claimed that the first draft of Rain was written by Clemence Randolph, daughter of the painter, ‘Sheriff Bob’ Chanler, with Colton – described by Mencken as a mere “Broadway jobber” – applying the finishing touches. However, producer John D. Williams’ recollection differed slightly from Mencken’s. “When Colton [not Randolph] had written half of the first act—on yellow sheets in lead pencil—he showed it to me, and it was then I contracted to buy the play,” he told the New York Evening Telegram in 1923. “As written by Mr. Colton and Miss Randolph, the magical touch of these two young dramatists had quickened Mr. Maugham’s plot and characters into a vivid and dramatic stage representation.”

Jeanne Eagels as Sadie Thompson

As Colton admitted to the Los Angeles Times in 1926, “The New York producers were afraid of Rain. It was a departure and the box office angle could not be overlooked. One day Jeanne Eagels, under contract to [Sam] Harris, unearthed the manuscript from a pile on the producer’s desk. She read the play and announced that Rain was to be her next vehicle. Harris laughed, other producers told her to stick to her own type—the ingénue of the moment. It had been planned that a sort of Peg o’ My Heart affair should be her next vehicle.”

“The play was shabby from travel,” Eagels agreed, in a 1927 interview for Collier’s magazine. “Every office boy in every producing house had tossed it about. Nobody seemed to want it.” But Jeanne did, of course. “The instant Sadie Thompson appeared in my reading of Rain I recognized her. Dinner-time came and went. I sat in my room, held by the script until the very last word. The next day I hurled myself into Sam Harris’ office and demanded the play. Sadie Thompson was mine. I’d lived her in my dreams a thousand times. She was real, somebody I knew. Somebody I could be.”

In Colton and Randolph’s Rain, Sadie never admits to being a prostitute, despite the accusations of a fanatical preacher. Miss Thompson is provided with a bona fide love interest in a U.S. soldier stationed on the island. Perhaps the dramatists felt that a romance with a fellow American would make Sadie more palatable to audiences than a string of liaisons with island natives.

A week before Rain was due to open at Philadelphia’s Garrick Theatre, the theatrical section of the Evening Public Ledger contained a very small advertisement touting the premiere of Sam Harris’ latest production. On October 7, 1922, a much larger ad was published that gave the play’s title and Eagels’ name equal prominence. Critics were initially unexcited by the production, dismissing it as merely “novel” and complaining about the monotony of the rain that fell throughout the play.

“Rain was put on after the usual hectic period when author and star are pitted against those determined to change everything—even the title,” John Colton said in 1926. “They wanted to call it ‘Red Light Sadie’ and when I heard that, I went out and got drunk for three days. Who wouldn’t? And they wanted to put in a bedroom scene. But Miss Eagels believed in the play as it was written, and wouldn’t permit any changes.”

According to producer John D. Williams, however, changes were made at Eagels’ behest. “In story conferences she was never a mere listener,” Williams told the New York Evening Telegram in 1923. “A good example is the second act of Rain. As it was written originally, after her great conflict with the missionary, Davidson, he said to her, ‘All right, Sadie Thompson, you are doomed.’ And that was the curtain. It was a negative, but it seemed pretty effective to me. Jeanne wasn’t satisfied. We had to worry about it a long time. Then we wrote in her scene where she throws back the challenge to him with her ‘All right, Reverend Davidson.’ It was one of the most effective scenes in the play, and it made a tremendous curtain for the act. It was her keen sense of theatre which told her that our original lines were not as good as they could be written.”

The cast of ‘Rain’

Rain opened on November 7 at the 900-seat Maxine Elliott Theatre on West 39^th Street. “Another flawless performance . . . is that of Jeanne Eagels in Rain, the merciless tragedy that John Colton and Clemence Randolph have made of Somerset Maugham’s masterly story, ‘Miss Thompson’,” Dorothy Parker wrote in a review for Ainslee’s Magazine. “Rain is, in short, a fine play, though if you go to the theatre to get all cheered up, it is only fair to mention that it is a cruel and bitter one. But you should see it, if you never see anything else.”

After 608 performances, Rain closed in mid-1924, and was revived later that year. Eagels then embarked on a nationwide tour, before bringing Rain back to New York in late 1926. “Camille is what they called ‘actor-proof’ until they saw Bernhardt,” John Colton wrote to Jeanne. “And Rain, to my sorrow and frustration, seems only to be able to tickle the ears of the groundlings unless you play it. It’s too bad. You made it too great. It can be no one else’s.”

In 1923, Colton adapted The Exciters, a play by Martin Brown that had once been offered to Jeanne, for the big screen. His next great success came in 1926, when The Shanghai Gesture opened on Broadway. Colton’s play told the story of an American girl lured into a life of vice in Shanghai.

In 1927, Gloria Swanson starred in Sadie Thompson, while Colton provided titles for Eagels’ last silent film, Man, Woman and Sin. He also wrote titles for The Enemy (1927), starring Lillian Gish; and Greta Garbo’s lost film, The Divine Woman (1928.) Another Garbo film, Wild Orchids (1929), was based on Colton’s story, ‘Heat’, renamed after studio heads realised that inviting moviegoers to ‘see Greta Garbo in Heat’ would be bad publicity.

In 1929, Sam Harris was hoping to cast Jeanne Eagels in another Colton play, The Sainted Wench, about a promiscuous woman married to a pious student. However, Jeanne died on October 3^rd. Colton moved to Hollywood, where he regaled friends like Irving Thalberg and John Gilbert with tales of the homosexual subculture he knew intimately, and shared his home with lesbian writer Mercedes de Acosta, who was infatuated with Greta Garbo.

John Colton (top left) and the Hollywood literati, 1935

Rain returned to the big screen in 1932, with Joan Crawford; and was revived on Broadway with Tallulah Bankhead in 1935. A stage musical, Sadie Thompson, was produced in 1945, while Rita Hayworth played Sadie in a 1953 movie. Diane Cilento and Carroll Baker would play the role in subsequent television adaptations, but no actress could match Eagels’ impact.

Renamed Saint Wench, Colton’s next play ran for just twelve performances in 1933, with Helen Menken as leading lady. Later that year, Colton’s Nine Pine Street – based on the true story of alleged murderess Lizzie Borden, and starring Lillian Gish – folded after twenty-eight performances.

In 1935, Colton wrote two horror films for Universal; Werewolf of London, and The Invisible Ray. In 1941, The Shanghai Gesture was filmed by Josef Von Sternberg. Although hampered by censorship, it is considered an early classic of film noir. Another Colton play, Under Capricorn, would be filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1949.

On August 14^th, 1945, John Colton had his first stroke. He spent the next year in Gainsville, Texas, recuperating and working on a new play. On December 26, 1946, Colton suffered a second stroke and died, aged fifty-eight, with his long-term friend, actress Madame Barry-Orlova, at his bedside.

As 2015 draws to a close – and this blog approaches her eighth birthday – I’ve been reflecting on a milestone year: from the reissue of The Mmm Girl and my inclusion in Fan Phenomena: Marilyn Monroe, to the publication of Jeanne Eagels: A Life Revealed, and my continuing association with Art Decades magazine.

But before I head back to the salt mines, I’d like to thank all my readers for supporting me. Wishing you all a wonderful 2016: and don’t forget to check out my annual picks in music, books, movies and TV.

Marion Cecilia Douras was born in Brooklyn on January 3, 1897, the youngest daughter of Judge Bernard Douras. She left school to model for commercial illustrators, and made her Broadway debut as ‘Marion Davies’ in Chin Chin (1914.) In 1916, she joined Ziegfeld’s Follies. Her first film, Runaway, Romany (1917) – which she also wrote – was produced by her brother-in-law, George W. Lederer.

Davies quickly became a popular movie actress, and the mistress of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. Although Hearst was married, and more than thirty years her senior, they lived together openly and hosted many lavish Hollywood parties at his various homes, including San Simeon (aka Hearst Castle.) In 1918, Hearst founded a movie studio, Cosmopolitan Productions, to advance Marion’s career. Cecilia of the Pink Roses (1918) was the first of these star vehicles.

Marion played Mary Tudor in When Knighthood Was in Flower (1922), and the film’s success encouraged Hearst to place her in other costume dramas, including Quality Street (1927), which Davies also produced. She fared better in comedies, such as Tillie the Toiler (1927) and The Patsy (1928.)

It has also been alleged that Marion secretly had a daughter, Patricia, with Hearst during the early 1920s, whom was raised by Davies’ sister, Rose. In 1924, producer Thomas Ince died after a party on Hearst’s luxury yacht. It was rumoured that Ince had been accidentally shot by Hearst during a quarrel with Marion and her supposed lover, Charlie Chaplin. However, Chaplin denied having attended the party, and Ince’s autopsy showed that he had suffered an attack of acute indigestion, and died the following day of a heart condition.

“God, I’d give everything I have to marry that silly old man,” Marion said of Hearst. “Not for the money and security … No, you know what he gives me, sugar? He gives me the feeling I’m worth something … he’s kind and he’s good to me, and I’d never walk out on him.”

The Cardboard Lover

In March 1927, Jeanne Eagels opened on Broadway in Her Cardboard Lover, an English adaptation of Jacques Deval’s drawing-room comedy. She was cast as Simone, the mistress of a man who will never divorce his wife. Desperate to end the relationship, Simone hires an impoverished young gambler to act as a buffer between herself and her former paramour, and finds herself falling in love with him. It was her first role following a sensational four-year run as Sadie Thompson in Rain.

Unfortunately, her performance was less rapturously received than Rain, and some critics thought Jeanne was overshadowed by co-star, Leslie Howard. She was further aggrieved by the news that Gloria Swanson would bring Sadie Thompson on the big screen. When Her Cardboard Lover closed for the summer, Jeanne headed for Hollywood to star opposite John Gilbert in Man, Woman and Sin. The film was produced at MGM, then home to a multitude of stars, including Marion Davies, who had previously met Jeanne at a party in the New York home of Ivor Novello in 1923.

Man, Woman and Sin was a troubled production – Jeanne found the film-making process tortuous, and after a series of rows with MGM executives, plans for a long-term contract were shelved. Nonetheless, the film was a hit, and in October, Jeanne embarked on a nationwide tour of Her Cardboard Lover.

Jeanne Eagels in ‘Her Cardboard Lover’ (1927)

By early 1928, the rigours of touring were starting to show. On March 11, she checked into the Milwaukee Plaza Hotel for a week’s run at the Davidson Theatre. Ticket sales promised a full house on opening night, but two hours before the curtain rose, it was announced that Jeanne would not be appearing that night due to severe food poisoning. The theatre remained dark all week. Jeanne was confined to her hotel room, accepting no calls or visitors. It was hoped that she would recover in time for the St. Louis opening on March 19, but when the company left, Jeanne stayed on at the Plaza Hotel.

John Montague, press-agent for Her Cardboard Lover, told the New York Sun that there were several reasons behind Jeanne’s meltdown. Her marriage to Ted Coy had recently collapsed, and her latest romance with actor Barry O’Neill was also in trouble. Additionally, she had lost the coveted lead role in a new play, Jealousy (though she would later play the role onscreen.)

On the day Jeanne arrived in Milwaukee, she had read in the New York Times that Her Cardboard Lover would soon be filmed at MGM with Marion Davies in the lead. In a production financed by Hearst, Robert Z. Leonard would direct. This was the second role originated by her that she was passed over for in Hollywood. If not for her battle with the studio during Man Woman and Sin, Jeanne might have been their first choice for Her Cardboard Lover.

Montague believed Jeanne was worried that once the play opened in Los Angeles, Davies would be able to closely observe the characterization that she had perfected over the last year. But upon the film’s September release, the Los Angeles Times noted that MGM’s The Cardboard Lover retained “but the merest suggestion of the play of the same name. The characters are reversed in this very free translation of the play.” Davies played the part of an American co-ed, accidentally hired to protect a famous tennis champion from a siren who is pursuing him. “The screen version falls far short of the charming whimsical comedy Jeanne Eagels made it on the stage,” the Buffalo Daily Courier decided, “but still it has another kind of humor, driven home with sledgehammer blows instead of delicacy.”

Marion Davies with Nils Asther in ‘The Cardboard Lover’ (1928)

In July 2015, the Daily Mail reported a remarkable discovery at a recycling centre in Devon, England. Mike Grant and his daughter Rachel had found a dozen reels of film inside an old paint tin, containing almost a hundred silent films, wedged behind a dumped shelving unit – including the first reel of The Cardboard Lover. The archive will be preserved at the British Film Institute. Only one other copy exists, and fortunately it is complete (though in need of restoration.)

“The Cardboard Lover is a clever, well-written comedy in which the primary showcase is Marion Davies’ significant comedic flair,” Lara Gabriella Fowler wrote in a review posted on her classic movie blog, Backlots.net. (Fowler is currently working on a biography of Davies.) “It features a tight plot and solid acting from all the necessary parties, and several subtle gags for which the viewer has to be on the lookout at all times!”

The Times She Had

Marion was credited as executive producer of The Cardboard Lover, and would produce all her subsequent films. She followed it with another successful comedy, Show People. In 1929, Davies remade her final silent film, Marianne, as a ’talkie’, working hard to overcome a slight stutter.

However, her box office appeal was beginning to fade, partly due to Hearst’s interference. Not So Dumb (1930) suffered a loss of $39,000. She went on to star in Peg O’ My Heart (1933), and was paired with Bing Crosby in Going Hollywood. However, her MGM days were numbered after Hearst fruitlessly campaigned for her to be cast in more prestigious vehicles.

Despite Marion’s long-standing friendship with the Thalbergs, Hearst broke off ties with MGM. Davies moved to Warner Brothers, where she starred in Cain and Mabel (1936) with Clark Gable. Her final film, Ever Since Eve, followed in 1937.

Hearst’s media empire was on the verge of collapse, and it was Marion – a formidable businesswoman, who had amassed her own fortune – who helped to bail him out. The Great Depression had hit newspaper sales badly, and as war loomed, Hearst fell out of step with public opinion.

Perhaps the greatest blow to Hearst’s reputation came with the release of Citizen Kane, Orson Welles’ portrait of a ruthless American tycoon, in 1942. The film was widely perceived as an attack on Hearst, though Kane was actually a composite of several figures.

Most hurtful of all was the depiction of Kane’s wife as a talentless singer whom he casts in a series of failed operettas. Critics and audiences wrongly assumed that ‘Susan Alexander’ was a thinly-veiled caricature of Marion Davies. In fact, Welles had based the character on someone else entirely. Hearst never forgave Welles, and spent his remaining years trying to destroy him.

Upon his death in 1951, Hearst’s family tried to freeze Marion out of his will. She took legal action to secure her inheritance, and shortly afterward eloped with Horace G. Brown, a former sea captain. Their marriage was not a happy one, and Marion reportedly drank heavily to escape her woes.

In her final decade, she produced a TV movie, Meet the Family, and founded a charity for orphans. Marion Davies died of stomach cancer at her Hollywood home on September 22, 1961, leaving an estate worth $20 million.

William Somerset Maugham was born in Paris on January 25, 1874, the fourth of six children. His father was a lawyer for the British Embassy. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was eight, and when his father passed away two years later, Maugham was sent to live with his uncle in England. The loss of his mother was devastating, and he remembered his uncle as a cold, cruel man. Maugham was also bullied at school due to his poor English and short stature, and developed a stammer that would recur sporadically throughout his life.

At sixteen, Maugham moved to Germany and studied at Heidelberg University. During his stay, he wrote his first book, and had an affair with an older Englishman.  Upon returning to Britain, Maugham asked to be excused from following the family profession of law. For the next five years, he studied medicine at St Thomas’ Hospital in London. In 1897, he published a novel, Liza of Lambeth, inspired by his observations of life in the city slums. The book’s success allowed him to pursue writing full-time.

Over the next ten years, Maugham travelled a great deal, but failed to match his early success until his 1907 play, Lady Frederick, paved the way for a prolific career in the theatre. His 1908 novel, The Magician, was inspired by the notorious occultist, Aleister Crowley. When war broke out in 1914, Maugham was too old to serve, but joined twenty-three other writers as a ‘literary ambulance driver’ for the Red Cross in France. He also worked as an intelligence officer.

Maugham’s 1915 novel, Of Human Bondage, was hailed by Theodore Dreiser as a work of genius. During this period, Maugham met a young American, Frederick Gerald Haxton, who became his companion and lover for thirty years. Despite his homosexuality, Maugham married interior designer Syrie Wellcome in 1917.

W. Somerset Maugham, shipboard circa 1920

The Moon and Sixpence, Maugham’s novel about the painter Paul Gauguin, was published in 1919. While travelling in the South Seas with Gerald Haxton, Maugham met the woman who would inspire one of his greatest short stories, ‘Miss Thompson’ or ‘Rain’. According to Samuel J. Rogal (author of A William Somerset Maugham Encyclopedia), “‘Miss Thompson’ evolved directly from notes that Maugham recorded while he and a number of passengers on their way from Hawaii to Tahiti lodged at a hotel in Pago Pago to await, during the hot and wet season, a quarantine inspection.”

In The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham, Selina Hastings confirms that the real Sadie Thompson, like her fictional counterpart, was a prostitute from Hawaii’s Red Light District of Ilwilei, and she was on the run from the law. Maugham had first encountered her while sailing from Honolulu. “She had a cabin two removed from mine,” he recalled, “and she kept that damnable gramophone going all day.” While Maugham led something of a double life, there was nothing furtive about Sadie’s sexual behaviour. “Holed up together in that squalid boarding-house,” Hastings writes, “Maugham and his fellow travellers continued to suffer from the brazen behaviour of Miss Thompson, or the ‘hot lollapalooza from Honolulu,’ as one of her boyfriends called her. The missionary was particularly enraged by her, by the ragtime, the drinking, the noise of the rusty bedsprings, as she entertained her numerous Samoan clientele…”

The Haleck Hotel on Pago Pago, also known as ‘The Sadie Thompson Inn’

H.L. Mencken, one of two publishers of the literary magazine, Smart Set, recalled in his autobiography, My Life as Author and Editor: “’Miss Thompson’ was meat too strong for the popular magazines, which were the chief American markets, and so Maugham’s agent, the American Play Company, was unable to sell it. As a last resort, it was sent to my partner and we published it in the issue for April 1921 and it almost went unnoticed.”

While staying in the same hotel as Maugham, playwright John Colton asked if he had considered turning his story into a play. As Maugham confirmed to columnist Ward Morehouse in 1965, “I didn’t see a play in the story at all, but (John) Colton did. I told him go ahead with it if he so desired.” Colton adapted Maugham’s story for the stage with Clemence Randolph, and as biographer Selina Hastings has noted, it would prove to be one of the most lucrative deals Maugham ever made.

“I was in Bangkok in Thailand when news reached me by cable, of the great New York success of Rain, adapted from my short story ‘Miss Thompson’”, Maugham told Morehouse. “I was astounded and couldn’t believe it.” On March 23, 1923—a day after Maugham boarded the Aquitania for London—his first impressions were quoted in the press. “It was with considerable curiosity that I witnessed a performance of Jeanne Eagels in Rain,” he confessed. “I had heard a great deal of a highly laudatory nature of her performance, and I must submit that I was provided with an amusing surprise. When I first saw Miss Eagels she struck me as being an interesting little English girl, and I could not quite understand how she could possibly represent the original Sadie Thompson of the story.” The pair had met at a tea party. After sizing up Jeanne’s willowy form, golden hair, and childlike face, Maugham took Sam Harris aside. “Good gracious!” he exclaimed. “This girl is Peter Pan, not Sadie Thompson.”

Jeanne Eagels as Sadie Thompson

“Judge of my surprise, then when she came on the stage and said ‘How’s everybody?’ with that hoarse, raucous voice,” Maugham told reporters. “I wondered where she got the idea. I had never told anybody of the peculiarities of Sadie Thompson’s diction, but here was Sadie Thompson to the life. Another curious thing was that Miss Eagels somehow hit upon the same sort of clothes that I saw the original wear; the same sort of coat, the same sort of hat, and the bangles on the wrists exactly as I saw Sadie Thompson in the flesh. Jeanne Eagels is truly an amazing young actress. Little did I ever dream that Sadie Thompson would be played so perfectly.”

Jeanne, however, was already making plans to leave the role that had made her Broadway’s most talked-about star, as Variety revealed in October 1923. Although Rain was expected to run for a full two seasons, Jeanne was considering The Moon and Sixpence as her next production, but decided against it. After reading the book, she found the male lead a more interesting character than the female, and she decided that she “doesn’t believe the importance of the two characters can be reversed.”

Although Gloria Swanson would play Sadie Thompson in the first Hollywood adaptation, the role would forever be associated with Jeanne Eagels, and in 1928, she played another of Maugham’s anti-heroines in her first talking picture. The Letter told the story of Leslie Crosbie, the adulterous wife of a Singapore rubber plantation manager. Spurned by her lover, Leslie shoots him and is put on trial for murder. As she lies under oath about why she killed him, her freedom is threatened by an incriminating letter.

“None of the cinema’s long succession of women testifying in their own defense has told as convincingly as Jeanne Eagels how she fired the shot that saved her virtue,” Time magazine declared when The Letter opened in March 1929. “Rather an effective contralto phonograph record than a moving picture, the film follows the construction of Somerset Maugham’s short story, a successful legitimate play last year.”

In 1929, Maugham divorced his wife, and that October, Jeanne Eagels died at thirty-nine. “I saw the part of Sadie Thompson played in many cities and in many languages, but no one ever touched Jeanne,” Maugham told Ward Morehouse in 1965. “Death took a great actress from us. Isn’t it strange how short are lives in the theatre? Careers, I mean. People struggle to get to the top. They stay there precariously for a while. And then they’re no longer at the top and are forgotten.”

Whereas Eagels had struggled to escape the shadow of Sadie Thompson, Maugham’s ascent continued. His novel, The Painted Veil, was published in 1925, and a year later, he moved to a villa on the French Riviera. Drawing on Maugham’s adventures in espionage, Ashenden (1928) is said to have inspired Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. Maugham’s own favourite novel was Cakes and Ale (1930.) In 1934, The Painted Veil was filmed with Greta Garbo, while Bette Davis starred opposite Leslie Howard in Of Human Bondage. Davis would later play Eagels’ role in a remake of The Letter.

When Germany invaded Paris in 1940, Maugham was forced to flee to England under cover of night, taking just one suitcase. That year, Bette Davis starred in a remake of The Letter. Maugham spent the remainder of World War II in America, using his experience of war as inspiration for The Razor’s Edge (1944.) After the death of Gerald Haxton in 1946, he returned to France. W. Somerset Maugham died in Nice on December 16, 1965.

Tallulah Brockman Bankhead was born in Huntsville, Alabama on January 31, 1902. Her mother, Adelaide, died of blood poisoning three weeks after Tallulah’s birth. Her father William, a prominent Democrat, suffered bouts of alcoholism and depression, and Tallulah was largely raised by her grandmother.

As a child, Tallulah was eclipsed by her pretty older sister, and developed a proclivity for attention-seeking behaviour. Her famously husky voice was a result of chronic bronchitis caused by childhood illness. By the age of fifteen, she had blossomed into a stunning Southern belle, and sent her photo to Picture Play magazine, as part of a contest. She won a trip to New York, where she briefly appeared in a movie.

Tallulah moved into the Algonquin Hotel and soon became a regular at wild parties. A promiscuous bisexual, she was also a cocaine user. She made her stage debut in The Squab Farm (1918), and won her first important role alongside Katherine Cornell and Francine Larrimore in Nice People (1921.)

In August 1922, the Boston Sunday Globe reported that Tallulah was in rehearsal for The Exciters – a play previously mooted for Jeanne Eagels, who was twelve years her senior. Eagels had recently starred in A Gentleman’s Mother, also penned by Martin Brown. However, the show had folded before reaching Broadway.

“I was idle until the fall of 1922 when I impersonated ‘Rufus Rand’ in The Exciters, a comedy which belied its title,” Tallulah recalled in her autobiography. “It succumbed to popular disapproval after five weeks. I’ll capsule the plot. Rufus was nineteen, semi-paralyzed because of a motor accident. In a fit of caprice she marries a burglar. Want to hear more? I didn’t think so.”

Neither did the audience. Premiering at the Times Square Theatre on September 22, The Exciters closed at the end of October after forty-three performances. Still better-known for her flamboyant personality than her talent, Tallulah decided to try her luck in Europe. In 1923, she appeared alongside Gerald Du Maurier in The Dancers at Wyndham’s Theatre, London. An instant sensation, Tallulah’s style was copied by a bevy of teenage girls who followed her every move.

While starring in The Creaking Chair (1924), Tallulah heard that Rain, a smash on Broadway for Jeanne Eagels, was coming to London. “I had been in London eighteen months when approached by Basil Dean to play Sadie Thompson,” Tallulah recalled. On January 4, 1925, the New York Times noted that Rain would soon be produced at St Martin’s Theatre. No actress had been cast, but the move was driven by Rain’s remarkable success in the United States. A nationwide tour—which Jeanne had begun in Chicago—was planned to last two years. According to Tallulah, producer Basil Dean proposed that the show would open no later than June 30, after she finished her West End run in The Creaking Chair, and Maugham returned to England. Dean suggested that Tallulah should sail to New York to see Jeanne in the role.

Tallulah boarded the Berengaria, and arrived in Manhattan on February 25, ready to watch Jeanne as Sadie—but she was already in Pittsburgh. After finally seeing Rain, Tallulah booked a return journey aboard the Aquitania, but Basil Dean and Maugham had also reserved cabins, and the producer thought it best that Tallulah did not meet the author yet. She was forced to find another passage, and recounted a terrible journey on “a cattle boat that consumed ten days in crossing. Among the passengers were a corpse and the two daughters of the Governor General of Canada. I locked myself in my cabin and played the jazz records Sadie played in the second act as I acted out my part.”

“Maugham sat in the dark auditorium throughout the first rehearsal,” Tallulah wrote. “I gave I’m sure what was a brilliant imitation of Jeanne Eagels. I felt my impersonation would electrify Maugham, but if it did he didn’t show it and avoided me afterwards.”

Maugham was unmoved by her performance, and she was replaced by Olga Lindo three days later. Adding insult to injury Tallulah was offered Lindo’s role in Tarnish, a part she’d turned down to accept Rain. “I was inconsolable,” Bankhead admitted. “I had hysterics and sobbed as I not sobbed since foiled as a child. That night I gave one of my phoniest performances in my life. Returning to my service flat, I put on Sadie’s Pago Pago costume, gulped down twenty aspirin tablets, turned on Sadie’s record, then I stretched out on my bed to await the end.”

Tallulah scribbled a note: “It ain’t gonna Rain no moh.” She fell asleep “dramatizing every detail of my suicide … I was awakened the next morning by the telephone. It was Noel Coward. I felt marvellous.” Coward wanted her to star in Fallen Angels. After seeing the play, Maugham invited her to lunch, congratulating her on “the most brilliant comedy performance he’d seen.”

Meanwhile, Lindo brought Sadie to the London stage—but the production was a failure. Years later, playwright Roland Leigh told Tallulah that during a conversation at his home in the south of France, Maugham confessed his biggest professional mistake had been “not letting Tallulah Bankhead play Rain.”

Fortunately, Tallulah had another hit on her hands with Falling Angels. Although some critics considered Coward’s tale of two women sharing recollections of a former lover to be rather scandalous, the play’s notoriety only increased its popularity.  “…I had a line: ‘Oh, dear, rain!’” she recalled. “I couldn’t resist the temptation to alter that line on opening night. On reaching it I mustered up my Sadiest Thompson voice and said: ‘My God, RAIN!’ The audience roared!”

She went on to star in The Green Hat (1925), based on Michael Arlen’s controversial novel; and They Knew What They Wanted (1926), which had won a Pulitzer Prize for author Sidney Howard. In August 1928, Tallulah played another role originated by Jeanne Eagels. Her Cardboard Lover had opened on Broadway in 1927. Jeanne’s British co-star, Leslie Howard, went on to recreate the role with Tallulah in London. Audiences were delighted to see her appear onstage in lingerie, and she was mobbed on opening night. After 173 performances, she toured Scotland and later revived the role in the United States. In 1929, she starred in a British-made, five-minute short film of the same name.

Actor Clifton Webb, a close friend of Eagels, was comforted by Tallulah when Jeanne died suddenly in New York on October 3, 1929. “We wanted to talk to somebody about this tragedy,” he remembered, “and ended up with Tallulah Bankhead and Beatrice Lillie at the Elysee where Tallulah lived and stayed for up for hours.”

In 1930, she played Marguerite Gautier in Our Lady of the Camellias, before returning to America permanently. Like Eagels before her, Tallulah was signed by Paramount – and marketed as ‘a combination of Jeanne Eagels and Marlene Dietrich’. She starred in several films, including Tarnished Lady (1931), Devil and the Deep and Faithless (1932.) But the Hollywood lifestyle was not to her liking, and she made her Broadway comeback in Forsaking All Others (1933.) That year, she nearly died while undergoing an emergency hysterectomy to combat venereal disease. In 1934, she starred in Dark Victory, which was later filmed with Bette Davis.

A decade after being rejected by Somerset Maugham, Tallulah Bankhead was cast by Rain’s original producer, Sam Harris, in a Broadway revival. “The throaty Tallulah this season made a name for herself along the Gay White Way and now she is to step into the Jeanne Eagels role of Sadie Thompson,” the Spokane Daily Chronicle reported in January 1935. “Much promise is held for the actress in the forthcoming part, which is believed by many to ideally suit the talents of Miss Bankhead.”

When Rain opened at the Music Box Theatre on February 12, columnist Paul Harrison noted many celebrities in the audience, including Gary Cooper and his wife Veronica, Beatrice Lillie, Noel Coward, Adolph Zukor, B.P. Schulberg, Francine Larrimore, Ben Lyon, and Bebe Daniels. The revival was not a success, however, and closed after forty-seven performances.

Varied reasons were given for its failure. Aside from Bankhead, the casting was all wrong. Some felt the story should have been modernized to reflect changing attitudes, rather than remaining set in 1920. As always, Tallulah had the last word: “I caught up with the Reverend Davidson ten years too late.”

In 1937, Tallulah appeared in another ill-fated revival, of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. That year, she married actor John Emery. They divorced in 1941. After starring in Maugham’s The Circle (1938), Tallulah won the role of a lifetime as the vindictive Regina Giddens in Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes. Like Jeanne Eagels in Rain, Tallulah’s performance would become a theatrical legend. And like Eagels, she would miss the chance to play the role onscreen. For the second time in her career, Tallulah was usurped by Bette Davis.

As Regina Giddens in ‘The Little Foxes’ (1939)

She followed this with Clifford Odets’ Clash by Night (1941), and another acclaimed role, opposite Fredric March in Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth (1942.) In 1944, she was lured back to Hollywood, giving her finest movie performance in Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat. In 1948, she enjoyed another stage success in a revival of Noel Coward’s Private Lives.

‘Lifeboat’ (1944)

Tallulah was infuriated by Bette Davis’ portrayal of an egotistical actress in the 1950 movie, All About Eve, as she believed it was based on herself. Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s theatrical satire also featured a tribute to Jeanne Eagels. Despite her outrageous reputation, Tallulah had a sensitive side. She was unfailingly generous to those in need, especially children, and helped families to escape the Spanish Civil War and World War II. She was also an early supporter of civil rights for African-Americans, much to the chagrin of her relatives in the South.

Worried by Tallulah’s rumoured alcoholism, producer Jack Warner replaced her with Gertrude Lawrence in his screen adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, which sank without trace. Tallulah began working in radio and television, as well as starring in a 1956 revival of A Streetcar Named Desire. Her final stage role was in another Williams play, The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore. Fittingly, the part had once been played by Bette Davis.

A lifelong insomiac, Tallulah was addicted to sleeping pills, which triggered psychotic episodes; and after many years of heavy smoking, she was diagnosed with emphysema. In 1965, she starred in a cult horror film, Fanatic (or Die! Die! My Darling), and later appeared as the Black Widow in a 1967 episode of TV’s Batman. Tallulah Bankhead died of pleural pneumonia at St Luke’s Hospital, Manhattan, on December 12, 1968, and was buried near her sister’s home in Maryland.

Louis Monta Bell was born in Washington D.C. on February 5, 1891. He began his career as a reporter for the Washington Herald during President Taft’s administration. Bell also appeared on the stage, and in a Charlie Chaplin short, The Adventurer (1917.) In 1923, he played another bit part in The Pilgrim, and served as story editor on Chaplin’s first serious feature, A Woman of Paris.

Bell made his directorial debut in 1924 with How to Educate a Wife, a Warner Brothers comedy starring Marie Prevost. His next picture, Broadway After Dark, starred Adolphe Menjou and Norma Shearer. Bell specialised in risqué comedies, in the style of Ernst Lubitsch. Now working for MGM, he directed Shearer and John Gilbert – the silent screen’s ‘Great Lover’ – in The Snob.

Shearer – with whom Bell was romantically involved – played a prostitute in Lady of the Night (1925), a gritty drama. ZaSu Pitts played a Broadway star in Pretty Ladies, while Adolphe Menjou appeared alongside Bessie Love and Greta Nissen in The King on Main Street. Marion Davies and Conrad Nagel starred in The Merry Wives of Gotham, which Bell also produced.

In late 1925, Bell viewed a screen test by a twenty year-old Swedish actress, who had just arrived in Hollywood. He was so impressed that he cast her in his next film, Torrent, introducing Greta Garbo to American audiences. She was an instant sensation, and quickly became one of the greatest stars in cinematic history.

Bell’s next film, The Boy Friend, was followed by two more collaborations with Norma Shearer, Upstage (1926) and After Midnight (1927.) On August 5, reports circulated that Broadway actress Jeanne Eagels would star opposite John Gilbert in MGM’s Fires of Youth. This would not be a remake of her 1917 Thanhouser film of the same name, but an original story written and directed by Monta Bell, based on his own journalistic experiences. It would later be renamed Man, Woman and Sin.

Monta Bell with Jeanne Eagels and John Gilbert, 1927

Jeanne left for Washington in the second week of August, to film exterior scenes before heading to MGM’s Culver City lot for interiors. On August 20, she stepped off the train with Gilbert and Bell not far behind into the warm Pasadena sunshine, to be greeted by several studio executives and a small band. But before long, difficulties were being reported from the set. These ranged from disagreements with MGM executives, to painful sinus infections that kept Jeanne bedridden and – most worrisome of all – her alleged drinking and drug binges.

An article published in Photoplay magazine after Jeanne’s death recounted how she had arrived late to the set one day for what should have been a simple scene. She was required to sit at a desk, pick up the receiver of the phone, and speak a few words into it. But she was unable to co-ordinate her movements and the action was rehearsed over and over until Bell was satisfied. When the cameras rolled, she seemed to lose her nerve. Bell filmed the scene multiple times in an attempt to catch something usable.

According to the New York Times, “the report on the Great White Way was that ‘the star was released from her film contract owing to ‘temperamental differences with the management.’” When she left for the train station in late September, there was no parade and band like the one that met her when she first arrived. It was even said that MGM were piecing together Jeanne’s remaining scenes from outtakes to avoid having to work with her again.

A scene from ‘Man, Woman and Sin’

Man, Woman and Sin was released on November 19. Its final cost was $236,000, and profits would reach $329,000. For all her discomfort with movie acting, reviews of Jeanne’s performance were glowing. Both a 16mm and a 35mm print of Man, Woman and Sin exist in the George Eastman Kodak Collection, and a print may be held in the Warner Bros. Archives, but due to legal issues, Man, Woman and Sin remains in limbo.

Monta Bell may have been more sympathetic to Jeanne’s plight than reports suggested. “If you don’t want her, I want her,” Monta Bell said when she was ditched by MGM. After directing Bellamy Trial (1929), a courtroom drama starring Leatrice Joy and Betty Bronson, Bell was ousted from MGM. Fortunately, he was quickly re-hired by Walter Wanger, who oversaw production at Paramount’s Astoria lot in New York.

Paramount’s first full-length “talkie” would be The Letter. Katherine Cornell had played the lead role in W. Somerset Maugham’s stage play about the adulterous wife of a Singapore rubber plantation manager who is put on trial for her lover’s murder. As Jeanne Eagels had enjoyed a spectacular four-year run as Sadie Thompson in Maugham’s Rain, she seemed the perfect choice to bring The Letter to the big screen.

Eagels with Monta Bell during filming of ‘The Letter’

More than a year had passed since the troubled shoot, and it seemed Bell was ready to work with Jeanne again. “The popular opinion that Miss Eagels is highly temperamental and is hard to work with has no foundation in fact,” he claimed. “I know of no other actress I would rather have working under me than Miss Eagels. Our association together in making Man, Woman and Sin was altogether happy. My interest in having Miss Eagels signed for future pictures at the time was prompted by the knowledge that she would be one of the most powerful attractions to the public and would bring a fresh and desirable element to the screen.”

Bell would produce The Letter, and while his protégé, Jean de Limur – who had worked with him on A Woman of Paris in 1923 – was credited as director, according to cameraman George Folsey, he worked under Bell’s close supervision.

Although Jeanne’s reputation preceded her, sound equipment was the foremost challenge to the cast and crew of The Letter. Scenes were rehearsed repeatedly, as the actors were learning to move within the microphone’s scope. The filmmakers were using equipment so sensitive that the gentle pawing of a cat against a door recorded at thunderstorm levels; and they once spent two days figuring a natural-looking method of lighting a cigarette without making it sound like an explosion.

‘The Letter’ (1929)

Despite all the technical issues that had arisen during production, The Letter wrapped two weeks ahead of schedule, in the third week of November. On December 10, Film Review announced that Jeanne had signed a contract to make two more films for Paramount. She began work on her next picture, Jealousy, in March 1929, just as The Letter opened to rave reviews. Although she was once again teamed with Monta Bell, this production did not go as smoothly, and Jeanne’s illness temporarily halted shooting.

“Eagels is making pictures that are not along the conventional lines of box-office success,” the Montana Standard’s movie critic observed when Jealousy opened in September. “The Eagels vehicles have strength and bitterness. More than that they are well done.”

‘Jealousy’ (1929)

The Laughing Lady would be Jeanne’s final film for Paramount. Victor Schertzinger would direct, with Monta Bell producing. Preliminary production began on August 26. After taking time off in Maine, Bell returned on September 3, the day The Laughing Lady began shooting.

Pre-production progressed smoothly until September 12, when Jeanne was admitted to St. Luke’s Hospital. She was diagnosed with ulcers of the eyes, caused by a severe sinus infection and compounded by an adverse reaction to the large, harsh studio lights used in filming. After X-rays determined that surgery was necessary, Jeanne went under the knife on September 14.

With her recovery incomplete, Paramount executives were forced to make a decision regarding The Laughing Lady, and on September 19, the studio announced that Ruth Chatterton would replace Jeanne when she returned from vacation. Two weeks later, Jeanne Eagels died.

Bell’s next important production, Applause – an early example of the backstage musical, starring Jeanne’s friend, singer Helen Morgan, and directed by Rouben Mamoulian – was released on October 7, four days after Jeanne’s death. This was followed in December by Glorifying the American Girl, a celebration of Ziegfeld’s Follies. That year, Bell had also worked on the Marx Brothers’ first feature-length movie, The Cocoanuts.

In 1930, Bell directed Young Man of Manhattan, a comedy starring Claudette Colbert and Ginger Rogers; and East is West, an adaptation of the hit Broadway play, starring Lupe Velez. Fires of Youth (1931), also known as Up for Murder, was a virtual remake of Man, Woman and Sin, with Genevieve Tobin and Lew Ayres recreating the roles originated by Eagels and Gilbert. In December 1931, Bell married the English actress Betty Lawford, who had appeared in his 1929 movie, Gentlemen of the Press, and was the cousin of Peter Lawford. They divorced six years later.

John Gilbert was reunited with Bell for one of his best movies, Downstairs (1932), which also marked Bell’s return to MGM. After directing Adolphe Menjou again in 1934’s The Worst Woman in Paris, Bell produced three more films for MGM: Men in White, starring Clark Gable and Myrna Loy; Student Tour, a vehicle for comedian Jimmy Durante; and West Point of the Air, a 1935 aviation drama starring Wallace Beery.

Bell’s next production credits were for two 1941 movies, Aloma of the South Seas (starring Dorothy Lamour), and a Bing Crosby musical, Birth of the Blues. His last directorial effort, China’s Little Devils (1945), starred former silent movie actor Harry Carey, and was made at the ‘Poverty Row’ studio, Monogram.

Monta Bell died at the Motion Picture Country House and Hospital in Los Angeles on February 4, 1958 – one day before his sixty-seventh birthday – and is interred in the Garden of Legends at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery.

Frances Margaret Anderson was born in the Australian city of Adelaide on February 10, 1897. From an early age she was drawn to the theatre. At seventeen, she made her stage debut at Sydney’s Theatre Royal. Encouraged by Americans in the company, she decided to try her luck in Hollywood. She later moved to New York, and after a slow start, found regular work touring with various stock companies.

After changing her stage name to Judith Anderson, she had her first Broadway success in Martin Brown’s 1924 play, Cobra, opposite leading man Louis Calhern. This was followed by Willard Mack’s The Dove (1925), produced by David Belasco.

While touring in The Dove, Anderson befriended Jeanne Eagels, who was also on the road with Rain. They were photographed with several other actresses in the Chicago Tribune, looking over souvenir programs to be sold at the National Horse Show. They met again in Boston in April 1926, as performers in the Theatrical Press Representatives of America fundraiser.

In 1927, Judith returned to Australia on tour. Back in the USA, she replaced Lynne Fontanne in Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude (1928.) While touring in 1929, she took time out to visit Jeanne Eagels in her new home in Ossining, New York. Anderson recalled Jeanne “sitting on the driveway wall, dressed in white, with a blue band around her fine blonde hair, looking like a girl of seventeen.”

As they watched the other guests playing by the river, Anderson complimented Jeanne on the diamond ring she was wearing. “It’s only a chip,” Jeanne joked. “Tomorrow I’ll get a real one.” She added seriously, “I can say these things to you, and you’ll understand. If I said them to other people they wouldn’t believe me.”

Illustration of Jeanne Eagels’ Cedar Lane home in Ossining, New York, where Judith Anderson visited her in 1929. Almost 90 years later, the exterior remains unchanged (photo courtesy of John Deuel)

On October 3^rd, Jeanne Eagels died. Anderson was among those interviewed for Eddie Doherty’s biography, The Rain Girl, which was serialised in Liberty magazine and later expanded into a controversial book. While many felt that Doherty had sensationalised Jeanne’s life, contributions from friends like Judith Anderson offered real insight into her offstage persona. Anderson’s next important role was in Luigi Pirandello’s As You Desire Me (1931), later filmed with Greta Garbo.

In his October 22 column, Ward Morehouse recalled that Sam Harris had optioned Sidney R. Buchman’s Storm Song for Jeanne Eagels, a play about the wayward daughter of a ship’s captain. After her death, Harris relinquished the rights to Robert V. Newman, who wanted either Claudette Colbert or Judith Anderson to star. Francine Larrimore stepped in after both Colbert and Anderson declined, but Storm Song never reached Broadway.

In 1932, Judith played Lavinia in a revival of O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra. Humphrey Bogart was her leading man in W. Somerset Maugham’s 1933 comedy, The Mask and the Face. Anderson scored another success in Zoe Akins’ The Old Maid (1935.) Her role would be recreated by Miriam Hopkins in the 1939 film. She starred with John Gielgud in a 1936 production of Hamlet, and in 1937, she married Benjamin Harrison Lehman, an English professor at Berkeley. They divorced in 1939.

Joan Fontaine with Judith Anderson in ‘Rebecca’ (1940)

In 1940, Judith played her most famous movie role, as the sinister housekeeper, Mrs Danvers, in Hitchcock’s Rebecca. Her subsequent films included Otto Preminger’s classic film noir, Laura (1945.) But she preferred the stage, playing Lady Macbeth in 1942, and Olga in a 1943 revival of Chekhov’s Three Sisters. She was reunited with John Gielgud in 1948, for her greatest triumph: as Euripides’ Medea.

She married producer Luther Greene in 1946, divorcing him five years later. During the 1950s she recorded numerous spoken-word albums, and played ‘Big Mama’ in the film adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. In 1960, she won an Emmy for a televised Macbeth. That year, she was made a Dame of the British Empire.

In 1970, Anderson returned to Hamlet – this time playing the title role. She would re-enact her performance as Medea in 1982. Two years later, she was cast as the Vulcan High Priestess in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. Her final appearance was a three-year stint in the TV soap opera, Santa Barbara – set in the California town she had made her home. Dame Judith Anderson died of pneumonia on January 3, 1992, aged ninety-four.

Marilyn Pauline Novak was born in Chicago on February 13, 1933. Her father was a history teacher who also worked as a railroad dispatcher, and her mother was employed in a factory. Both parents were of Czech descent, and had an elder daughter, Arlene.

After graduating from high school, Novak attended Wright Junior College, and won a scholarship to Chicago’s School of the Art Institute. She was also working as a model, and during the summer before her art studies were due to begin, Novak went on a cross-country tour promoting a refrigerator brand at trade shows.

After arriving in Los Angeles, she won a walk-on part in The French Line, a Jane Russell movie. According to biographer Peter Harry Brown, Novak was spotted on the set by Columbia’s Maxwell Arnow, and signed to a long-term contract. Hollywood already had its Marilyn, so she reluctantly changed her name.

Kim Novak was quickly built up as a successor to Columbia’s reigning glamour queen, Rita Hayworth. Her first great success was as a small-town beauty in Picnic (1955), Joshua Logan’s adaptation of a William Inge play, which earned her a Golden Globe award as Most Promising Newcomer. She then starred in Otto Preminger’s The Man With the Golden Arm, starring Frank Sinatra as a heroin-addicted musician.

In June 1956, columnist Dorothy Kilgallen reported that Rita Hayworth would star in The Jeanne Eagels Story, an upcoming film about the stage actress, as part of a ‘kiss-and-make-up deal’ with Columbia. Hayworth had recreated Eagels’ most celebrated role in Miss Sadie Thompson. But in December, Louella Parsons reported that Novak, who had hoped to spend the holiday season with her family in Chicago, would “appear the day after Christmas to do her first scene in Jeanne Eagels. It will be a hot hoochy-koochy number in the briefest costume Kim ever wore.”

Kim bore a slight physical resemblance to Eagels, though her hair and make-up were more reminiscent of Jean Harlow. Costumer Jean Louis created a vast wardrobe for Novak, entailing forty-five costume changes. According to author Larry Kleno, Kim “devoted her full energies to the exacting task of presenting Jeanne. She read everything she could find on her, learning, for instance, that ‘Eagels was irrational and sensitive and all the things I sort of am, and she used to eat pickles at school like me’ … Her dressing room walls were covered with photos of the real Jeanne, and she employed an accordionist for several weeks to play ‘Poor Butterfly’ during the film’s sad scenes.”

Novak in ‘Sadie Thompson’ mode

The American Weekly covered the production in its July 28, 1957 issue. “Before each day’s shooting, Kim sat with her director, plump, placid, pipe-smoking George Sidney. He would tell her what kind of girl Jeanne Eagels was. He would take a pull on his briar and say: ‘You came up out of Kansas City. You’re a tough trouper. You’ve been in carnivals and in stock. You’ve done all the difficult things in show business. On the outside you’re a kind of callous kid. Underneath you’re easily hurt.’”

With Jeff Chandler as ‘Sal Satori’,a character based on producer Maurice Dubinsky

However, while Jeanne Eagels (1957) utilised the basic facts of the star’s life story, the end result was distorted beyond recognition. Based on Eddie Doherty’s controversial biography, The Rain Girl, it was intended to showcase Novak’s potential as a serious actress, but achieved the opposite. Released that August, Jeanne Eagels did irreparable damage to the memory of a Broadway legend, and proved a critical failure.

While some critics thought Kim woefully miscast, others praised her acting. The real problem was not Novak’s performance, but the lurid script and its melodramatic treatment. Relatives of Jeanne Eagels filed suit in the Los Angeles Superior Court, seeking damages of $950,000 from both George Sidney and Columbia for depicting Jeanne “as a dissolute and immoral person.” However, Columbia’s defense (that you can’t defame the dead) was upheld.

That year, Kim became romantically involved with black entertainer Sammy Davis Jr. After their romance was exposed in the press, Columbia boss Harry Cohn – fearful that a racist backlash would ruin the career of his biggest star – forced the couple to part.

Kim was reunited with Sinatra in the musical, Pal Joey, also starring Rita Hayworth. In 1958, Alfred Hitchcock cast Novak in a dual role, opposite James Stewart in Vertigo. Although poorly received initially, Vertigo’s reputation has soared. In 2012, Sight & Sound magazine’s critics named it the greatest film of all time, usurping Citizen Kane after fifty years in the top spot. Next, Kim starred as a modern-day witch in Bell, Book and Candle; and Middle of the Night (1959), based on Paddy Chayevsky’s play.

In 1960, Kim was engaged to director Richard Quine. The wedding was later called off, but they collaborated again on The Notorious Landlady (1962.) With her Columbia contract at an end, she was now a free agent. During filming, she bought a home by the sea in Big Sur, California, which became her lifelong refuge from Hollywood.

In 1964, Kim starred in a remake of W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage. This was followed by Billy Wilder’s Kiss Me Stupid, which was condemned by the Legion of Decency, but has since been reappraised as a daring sex comedy. In 1965, she married British actor Richard Johnson, her co-star in The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders. They divorced less than a year later.

After her Bel Air home was lost in a mudslide, Kim decided to leave Hollywood behind. From then on, she lived full-time in Big Sur, returning to her first love – painting – and writing poetry and lyrics for folk songs, recorded by Harry Belafonte and others. She continued making films, such as Robert Aldrich’s The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968), but after attending the premiere, was devastated to learn that her lines had been dubbed. During the 1970s she worked in both film and television. In 1976 she married veterinarian Robert Malloy.

In Just a Gigolo (1979), Kim bridged the gap between old stardom and new, represented by co-stars Marlene Dietrich and David Bowie; and she was part of another all-star cast in The Mirror Crack’d (1980), based on an Agatha Christie mystery, alongside Elizabeth Taylor, Tony Curtis and Rock Hudson. In 1986, Kim played a recurring role in TV soap opera, Falcon Crest. While filming Liebestraum (1991) she clashed with director Mike Figgis, prompting her retirement from acting.

Six years later, a memoir in progress was destroyed during a fire at her home in Big Sur. Unlike many of Hollywood’s ‘love goddesses’, however, Kim Novak has thrived away from the spotlight, living quietly with her husband of forty years, raising horses, exhibiting her art, and making occasional appearances at film festivals.

Frederick Barkham Warde was born in Wardington, Oxfordshire, on February 23, 1851. Educated at the City of London School, he had planned to become a lawyer. But after being cast as ‘Second Murderer’ in an 1867 production of Macbeth, a life on the stage beckoned. He learned his craft at the Theatre Royal in Glasgow, playing eighty parts in nine months.

In 1871, he married actress Annie Edmondson. They would have four children together. After playwright Dion Boucicault encouraged Warde to try his luck across the Atlantic, he made his American debut in Boucicault’s Civil War play, Belle Lamar, at Booth’s Theatre, New York City, in 1874. Over the next few years, Warde established himself as a leading man, and formed a successful partnership with actor Maurice Barrymore.

As a new century loomed, Warde partnered with another classical actor, Louis James, and later starred opposite Kathryn Kidder in Salammbo, an adaptation of Gustave Flaubert’s historical novel. In 1902, he ‘discovered’ actor Douglas Fairbanks, who would later become one of the greatest stars in silent film.

By 1904 Warde was deeply in debt, and was forced to declare himself bankrupt. Fortunately, it proved to be only a temporary setback. That summer he embarked on a lecture tour, and in 1905, went on the road with his own company in productions including The Winter’s Tale. In the summer of 1909, assisted by his two sons, he opened The Frederick Warde Institute of Oratory, Expression and Shakespearean Study on his 30-acre estate, Wardesden, at North White Lake, New York.

At sixty-one, Warde made his movie debut in The Life and Death of King Richard III (1912.) Rediscovered over seventy years later, it is thought to be the oldest surviving American feature film. In November 1915, he signed a contract with America’s leading independent filmmaker, Edwin Thanhouser. Warde starred as the eponymous weaver in Silas Marner (1916), which was followed by a feature-length King Lear, and The Vicar of Wakefield in 1917.

All three films have survived, though Warde’s next production for Thanhouser – Hinton’s Double – is thought to be lost. On March 24, 1917, Thanhouser-Pathé announced that they had signed Jeanne Eagels to appear in two films opposite Frederick Warde. The twenty-seven year-old actress had recently starred in another Thanhouser movie, The World and the Woman.

Frederick Warde with Jeanne Eagels and child star Helen Badgley in ‘The Fires of Youth’ (1917)

In The Fires of Youth, directed by Emile Chautard, Warde played a wealthy industrialist returning to his boyhood town to recapture the joy forsaken while amassing his millions. He befriends a young boy, Billy (played by child actress Helen Badgley), and becomes infatuated with Billy’s sister, Rose (Eagels.)

The Fires of Youth was released on June 17 to good notices. The original five-reel Pathé Exchange version, lasting more than an hour, is now missing. The Imperial Film Company later re-released a two-reel, thirty-one minute version, which is still in print.

A gun-toting Eagels defends Frederick Warde (right) in ‘Under False Colors’ (1917)

Chautard would direct Warde again in his second feature opposite Jeanne, Under False Colors. It was a timely film, set in Russia prior to the March 1917 dethronement of Czar Nicholas. Critics cited Eagels’ alliance with Warde as “acting of the highest class” one of the “best starring combinations ever seen on the screen.” Sadly, Under False Colors is now lost.

While Eagels returned to Broadway, Warde’s next Thanhouser production, The Heart of Ezra Greer, would be his last, as the studio had begun phasing down operations. Warde went on to star in three more films, including A Lover’s Oath, which marked the screen debut of Ramon Novarro.

In 1921, Warde recorded an early sound film, Frederick Warde Reads Poem, A Sunset Reverie. After his wife died in 1923, he went into semi-retirement. Frederick Warde died of a heart condition at his daughter’s Brooklyn home on February 7, 1935.

Harry Montagu Love was born in Portsmouth, Hampshire on March 15, 1880. His father was an estate agent. He became a newspaper illustrator during the Anglo-Boer War at the turn of the century. By 1911, he was a professional actor. He sailed to America in 1913, supporting the English actor, Cyril Maude, in Grumpy, which had a successful Broadway run followed by a nationwide tour. After returning to New York, he appeared in George Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man and Candida at the Garrick Theatre. One of Love’s first films, Hearts in Exile (1915), starred Clara Kimball Young.

On February 5, 1916, the New York Dramatic Mirror revealed producer Joseph Brooks’ plans to revive C. Haddon Chambers’ 1891 play, The Idler, at the Shubert Theatre on March 27. Brooks filled the main roles with some of the biggest names of the English stage: Phyllis Neilson Terry, Marie Tempest, Montagu Love, and Cynthia Brooke. At twenty-six, Jeanne Eagels was the only American in the cast.

Rehearsals for The Great Pursuit (the play’s new title) began on February 18. The Dramatic Mirror announced that it would open in Canada on March 13. On March 2, however, the Evening Telegram reported that after an enthusiastic reception in Toronto, Brooks had decided to bypass Montreal, and so The Great Pursuit came to New York earlier than expected, opening on March 20.

“The Herald’s statement that ‘the play is overburdened with dialogue’ coincides with the view of The Evening Sun’s that ‘it is just an English drawing room comedy-drama, 1916 pattern,’” Billboard summarised in its April 1 edition. “And this The Evening World echoes with emphatic ‘Amen—heaven help it!’ Added to these is the deeply-drawn sigh of the Tribune: ‘It is hopelessly aged dramatic material.’”

The public stayed away from The Great Pursuit, with box office receipts peaking at a paltry $500 to $600 per night. After only twenty-nine performances, Joseph Brooks abruptly closed the show on April 15, the same day he informed the press and cast.

It would be Love’s last Broadway role for five years, as he focused increasingly on film. Released in September 1916, Friday the 13^th starred Robert Warwick. It was directed by French cinema pioneer Emile Chautard; boasted a screenplay by Frances Marion, one of the most influential women in early American film; and was distributed by the World Film Corporation, for whom Love would play the title role in Rasputin: The Black Monk (1917.)

On October 31, Jeanne Eagels signed a contract with World Pictures-Brady to film The Cross Bearer, opposite Montagu Love in the contemporary tale of Cardinal Mercier, who had protected his church and townspeople when the German army invaded the Belgian city of Leuven. Ten years younger than Love, Jeanne played the Cardinal’s young ward. It was directed by Emile Chautard’s protégé, George Archainbaud.

Before its official release in April 1918, The Cross Bearer was given a four-day run at Carnegie Hall to raise funds for the Red Cross. Tickets were priced at 50¢ to $1, with box seats at $10 each. The film was even endorsed by the King of Belgium. “An altogether exceptional, extraordinary picture,” the Hattiesburg American raved. “Love’s Cardinal is quite the best he has contributed to the screen and Jeanne Eagels is charming as Liane de Merode.” Sadly, The Cross Bearer is now believed lost.

Jeanne Eagels With Montagu Love in ‘The Cross Bearer’ (1918)

Love’s final role for World Film was in The Steel King (1919.) The company ceased production in 1921. Five years later, Love appeared in The Son of the Sheik, starring Rudolph Valentine, and opposite John Barrymore in Don Juan. He often played villainous roles, as in The Haunted House, a 1928 comedy starring Thelma Todd, and the 1929 horror film, The Last Warning. He starred opposite Lillian Gish in The Wind (1928.)

In February 1928, Love divorced his wife of twenty years, marrying Marjorie Hollis in March 1929. In The Constant Wife, a 1929 adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s play, Love starred opposite Ruth Chatterton. Based on Jules Verne’s novel, The Mysterious Island (1929) was filmed at the MGM lot in Los Angeles. As the film industry moved West, Love followed, making sporadic appearances on Broadway until 1934.

Love’s clipped British accent complemented his overbearing appearance, and he made the transition to sound with ease. His first talking picture was Bulldog Drummond, starring Ronald Colman. Jeanne Eagels was among those who attended the May 5 premiere at New York’s Apollo Theatre. She died nearly five months later, aged thirty-nine.

His long association with Warner Brothers began in 1930. Many of his subsequent roles were glorified bit parts, adding prestige to each picture. His characterisations were now more sympathetic, and he was often cast as historical figures – such as Thomas Jefferson in Alexander Hamilton (1931), William Gladstone in Parnell (1937), and Henry VIII in The Prince and the Pauper (1937), alongside fellow Englishman George Arliss.

In 1932, Love appeared in a modern-day version of William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (also known as Indecent), starring Myrna Loy. Limehouse Blues, a 1934 crime drama starring George Raft, was set in Love’s native England, while London by Night (1937) was a mystery set against the backdrop of the newspaper industry, where he had started his career.

A natural choice for swashbucklers and costume dramas, he went on to play roles in Clive of India (1935), The Prisoner of Zenda (1937), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938.) In 1939, he was seen in Gunga Din, Juarez, and The Man in the Iron Mask.

As a new decade dawned, Love remained prolific, acting in films like The Sea Hawk, All This and Heaven Too, and The Mark of Zorro (1940.) He appeared in the 1941 comedy, The Devil and Miss Jones, and played George Washington in The Remarkable Andrew (1942.) His final role, as the Reverend Patrick Brontë in the literary biopic, Devotion (his 179th film), would not see the light of day until 1946.

One of Hollywood’s greatest character actors, Montagu Love died, aged sixty-six, at his Beverly Hills home on May 17, 1943.

Lucille Fay LeSueur was born in San Antonio, Texas, on March 23, 1904. Her father, Thomas E. LeSueur, abandoned her mother, Anna Bell Johnson, and her two eldest children, while she was still pregnant. Anna began a new relationship with Henry J. Cassin, and the family lived with him in Lawton, Oklahoma, where he ran the Ramsey Opera House. After Cassin was accused of embezzling, the family moved to Kansas City, Missouri in 1916.

Now penniless, Lucille (nicknamed Billie) received a haphazard education at the various boarding schools where she cooked and cleaned in lieu of tuition fees. She briefly attended college in Columbia, Missouri, before dropping out and returning to Kansas City. She joined a chorus line, travelling to Detroit, Oklahoma City, and Chicago on the revue circuit. In 1924, she caught the eye of producer Jacob J. Shubert, and joined the chorus of Innocent Eyes in New York.

Her screen test for the newly-formed MGM Studios was promising enough to merit a trip to Hollywood. Newly-named Joan Crawford as the result of a magazine contest, she busied herself within MGM’s Culver City walls, and entered and won local dance competitions before playing her first significant role in Sally, Irene and Mary (1925), and being selected as a WAMPAS Baby Star in 1926.

A young Joan Crawford (left) with Dorothy Sebastian in ‘Our Dancing Daughters’ (1928)

She established herself as a romantic foil for matinee idols like John Gilbert and Ramon Navarro, and while appearing in The Unknown (1927), she learned about the craft of acting from co-star Lon Chaney. But it was her role as shop-girl Diana Medford in Our Dancing Daughters (1928) which made Joan Crawford an icon of the flapper generation, and chief rival to Paramount’s ‘It Girl’, Clara Bow. Then in 1929, she married Douglas Fairbanks Jr, elevating her to Hollywood royalty.

Her first talking picture, Untamed (1929), was a hit with the public. In Paid (1930), she played a wrongly accused ex-convict. She would make eight films with Clark Gable, including Possessed (1931) and Dancing Lady (1933.) And in the classic Grand Hotel (1932), she held her own against Greta Garbo and John Barrymore.

As Sadie Thompson in ‘Rain’ (1932)

United Artists hoped to repeat the success of their 1927 adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s provocative short story, “Miss Thompson,” borrowing Crawford from MGM for the lead role. Tongues immediately began wagging. Less than three years had passed since the death of Kansas City native Jeanne Eagels, who had originated the role on Broadway. Crawford’s fellow cast members were plucked from the New York theatre, and remembered Jeanne fondly. “Listen, fishcake,” actor Walter Catlett told Crawford, “When Jeanne Eagels died, Rain died with her.”

Directed by Lewis Milestone, who had won an Oscar for All Quiet On the Western Front (1930), Rain was filmed on Catalina Island, using sets from Gloria Swanson’s silent version. Crawford neglected to build a rapport with her co-stars or the crew, preferring to stay in her bungalow at night and play Bing Crosby records. Her marriage to Douglas Fairbanks Jr. was also in trouble.

With director Lewis Milestone and Walter Huston (who played Reverend Davidson) on the ‘Rain’ set

When Rain was released in October 1932, Crawford’s previously loyal fan base railed against her playing a prostitute, and for the first time in her career, she began to receive hate mail. Critics were mostly cruel, but some acknowledged her bravery in attempting a fresh take on Sadie Thompson.

“I hope they burn every print of this turkey that’s in existence,” Crawford remarked, seemingly in accord with her detractors. And her opinion did not change over the years. “Every actress is entitled to a few mistakes, and that was one of mine,” she reflected. “I don’t care what anybody says, I was rotten.” However, Crawford’s Rain has aged rather better than might have been predicted. The black-and-white photography creates a dismal, claustrophobic atmosphere, and Joan’s hard-edged performance is unexpectedly moving.

The cast of ‘Rain’

The Fairbanks marriage ended in 1933, and two years later, Joan married stage actor Franchot Tone. In 1937 she was named the first Queen of the Movies by Life magazine, but her victory was short-lived. In 1938, Crawford was one of several stars denounced as ‘box office poison’ by Harry Brandt, President of the Independent Theatre Owners of America.

By 1939 Joan was single again, and making a comeback in George Cukor’s The Women. She adopted a daughter in 1940, naming her Christina. After another acclaimed performance in A Woman’s Face (1941), Joan married actor Philip Terry and they adopted a son.

With Ann Blyth in ‘Mildred Pierce’ (1946)

Crawford’s eighteen years at MGM ended by mutual agreement in 1943. She began a three-picture deal with Warner Brothers, appearing in Hollywood Canteen (1944), and served in the American Women’s Voluntary Services. In 1946, Crawford divorced Terry and starred in the classic film noir, Mildred Pierce, as a self-made businesswoman who sacrifices everything for her treacherous daughter. She followed this with Humoresque (1947) and Flamingo Road (1949), and adopted identical twin girls.

After an Oscar nomination for Sudden Fear (1952), Joan starred in Nick Ray’s subversive Western, Johnny Guitar (1954.) Her final marriage was to Alfred Steele, President of Coca Cola, in 1955. She travelled extensively promoting the brand, even after his death from a heart attack in 1959.

‘Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?’ (1962)

In 1962, Robert Aldrich cast Crawford against old rival Bette Davis in the horror classic, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? The two actresses played aging child stars, and despite palpable tension on the set, they were reunited in Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964.) By the early 1970s, Joan had retreated from the spotlight. Although she would be ranked tenth in the American Film Institute’s 2004 list of classic Hollywood female stars, her reputation has never fully recovered from daughter Christina’s allegations of abuse.

On May 10, 1977, Joan Crawford died of a heart attack at her New York apartment. Her ashes were placed in a crypt alongside those of her late husband, Alfred Steele.

Gloria May Josephine Swanson was born in Chicago on March 27, 1899. Her father was in the US army, and the family moved frequently during her childhood. After an aunt took her to visit Essanay Studios in Chicago, she left school to work as an extra. She made an uncredited debut in The Song of Soul, and acted alongside Charlie Chaplin in His New Job (1915.)

When her parents separated, Gloria moved to California with her mother, Adelaide. She was teamed with Bobby Vernon in a series of Keystone comedies for producer Mack Sennett, including The Danger Girl (1916) and The Sultan’s Wife (1917.) While working for Sennett, she was briefly married to actor Wallace Beery.

Gloria was glad to escape stunts and slapstick when she signed to Paramount in 1919. That year, she married Herbert K. Somborn, president of Equity Pictures. Their daughter, Gloria Swanson Somborn, was born in 1920. Under the direction of Cecil B. DeMille, Swanson starred in Don’t Change Your Husband and Male and Female (1919); Why Change Your Wife? and Something to Think About (1920); and The Affairs of Anatol (1921.)

Barely five feet tall, and often bedecked in jewels and feathers, Gloria Swanson was Hollywood’s original fashion plate. In 1921, she began another fruitful partnership with director Sam Wood, starring in The Great Moment, from a story by Elinor Glyn; Beyond the Rocks (1922), with Rudolph Valentino; Zaza (1923), and The Humming Bird (1924.)

Gloria adopted a son, Joseph Patrick Swanson, in 1923. Her divorce from Somborn, finalised in 1925, was embroiled in scandal as he accused her of affairs with thirteen men. As a result, Paramount added a morals clause to her contract. Husbands and lovers came and went, but to her legion of fans she was always ‘Miss Swanson’.

She travelled to France for Madame Sans-Gene (1925.) For the first time, she and director Léonce Perret were allowed to film scenes in historic sites associated with Napoleon. Unfortunately, the film is now considered lost. During production, Gloria began a new romance with her interpreter, Henri, Marquis de la Falaise, becoming the first Hollywood star to marry into minor European nobility.

Later that year, she appeared in a short film with sound, and re-enacted Salome’s Dance of the Seven Veils in a technicolour sequence for the hit comedy, Stage Struck. Her last film for Paramount was Fine Manners (1926.) She joined United Artists, founded in 1919 by Chaplin and other stars. But her first independent film, The Love of Sunya (1927), failed to recoup its budget.

Gloria Swanson in ‘Sadie Thompson’ (1928)

“Gloria Swanson is to film ‘Sadie Thompson’ as her next part,” Louella Parsons announced in her syndicated column on May 27, 1927. “I think I should make the distinction that Sadie Thompson and Rain are not one and the same,” she added, “although they are both based on Maugham’s famous character. Rain which Jeanne Eagels made such a hit on the stage is a dramatisation of Sadie Thompson, but it is decidedly censurable. Sadie Thompson in the movies will stick closely to the text of the original story.”

One can imagine the sound of breaking glass and furniture being tossed around the dressing room of the Empire Theatre, where Eagels was starring in Her Cardboard Lover. There had been plans to film Rain since 1923, though as Helen Klumph predicted in the Los Angeles Times, “It looks as though very little could ever really reach the screen. Of course everyone familiar with this great story of S. Maugham’s realized that when the film version came about Sadie Thompson would have been washed white as the driven snow.”

Swanson met with director Raoul Walsh, and the duo came up with the idea of her playing Sadie Thompson. Having seen Eagels in the role at least twice, Swanson thought it perfect for her next project, but there was one problem—the stage play had been added to the list of “immoral” shows banned from screen adaptation by the Hays Office in 1923.

Swanson with co-star and director Raoul Walsh

Swanson and Walsh’s solution was to erase all profanity and change Reverend Davidson to Reformer Atkinson to appease the clergy and censors, but the film was still a risky proposition. The pair worked with United Artists partner, Joseph M. Schenck, who purchased the film rights to John Colton and Clemence Randolph’s play, so that no other studio could produce it. Next, the rights for W. Somerset Maugham’s original story were purchased from his agent. As well as directing, Walsh would play her lover, Sergeant O’Hara, with Lionel Barrymore cast as Atkinson.

Gloria then invited Will Hays to lunch and briefly outlined her project, framing it as a contemporary moral fable. However, a backlash swiftly arose among those who believed the film would irreparably damage American morals. To quell this rising storm, Swanson braved the press, insisting that her motives were honourable. Gossip columns and entertainment sections of newspaper across America were filled with stories from the set of Sadie Thompson. Meanwhile, Jeanne Eagels arrived in Hollywood to star opposite John Gilbert in MGM’s Man, Woman and Sin.

“I know it is an idle dream, but I would be very happy if I could continue playing Sadie Thompson indefinitely,” Swanson told reporters, “for she is a character that will live long in the memories of all who become familiar with her story.” Though this must have infuriated Jeanne, she could take some satisfaction from the fact that Sadie Thompson was now wildly over-budget.

Swanson was forced to sell her Croton-on-Hudson country home and was contemplating the same fate for her Manhattan apartment until Joe Schenck stepped in with the needed funds. Sadie Thompson would become one of Gloria Swanson’s greatest successes, commercially and critically. Unwisely, she had taken advice from her new lover, Joseph P. Kennedy, to sell the rights to Schenck.

Kennedy would also produce her next film, Queen Kelly (1929.) After firing director Eric Von Stroheim, Gloria pieced together the costly footage and hurriedly shot a different ending. Never released in the US, Queen Kelly was shown in Europe and South America. Swanson’s first talking picture, The Trespasser (1929), was more successful.

She divorced Falaise in 1930, marrying an Irish playboy, Michael Farmer, a year later. They had a daughter, Michelle, before divorcing in 1934. Gloria then had a three-year affair with married British actor Herbert Marshall, who had co-starred with Jeanne Eagels in her first talkie, The Letter, shortly before her death in 1929.

Swanson left Hollywood for New York in 1938, and set up an inventions and patents company, enabling Jewish scientists to make a living after fleeing Europe during World War II. She dabbled in fashion design, wrote a syndicated column, performed in summer stock and the occasional movie, and enjoyed painting and sculpting.

Swanson as Norma Desmond in ‘Sunset Boulevard’ (1950)

Her fifth marriage, to insurance broker William H. Davey in 1945, lasted less than three months. In 1948, she hosted one of the first live television shows, The Gloria Swanson Hour. Then in 1950, she made a spectacular comeback in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. The role of Norma Desmond, a reclusive former silent movie star, was offered to Swanson after being rejected by Mary Pickford, Pola Negri and Mae West. Filmed at Paramount, the studio where Gloria had once reigned supreme, Sunset Boulevard was hailed as a masterpiece.

A lifelong Lutheran and staunch Republican, Swanson petitioned Congress to maintain school prayer in 1964, and was later a prominent advocate of Ronald Reagan during his first presidential campaign. However, Gloria would also support ex-Beatle John Lennon when he applied for US residency, despite his well-known radicalism.

She continued to work in television and theatre, and appeared as herself in the all-star disaster movie, Airport 1975. She married her long-term companion, journalist and ghostwriter William T. Dufty, with whom she collaborated on a bestselling health book, Sugar Blues, in which she extolled the benefits of a macrobiotic diet. An autobiography, Swanson on Swanson, followed in 1980. The couple travelled widely, enjoying the high life and maintaining several lavish homes.

Gloria Swanson died of a heart ailment at New York Hospital on April 4, 1983.

Loretta Helen Cooney was born in Harlem, New York on April 1, 1883, to Irish parents. Her mother, Elizabeth Dorsey, was the owner of a successful millinery, and the family breadwinner. Loretta had two younger siblings. A gifted mimic, she was encouraged by Elizabeth to pursue a life on the stage, though her father, James Cooney, disapproved.

After taking lessons from vaudeville performer Ida Whittington, Loretta started her own act, imitating famous entertainers like Anna Held, and billing herself as ‘La Belle Laurette.’ Then in 1901, Ida introduced her to the playwright and producer, Charles Taylor. Laurette joined his troupe and went on the road in shows like the aptly titled Child Wife – produced just after their marriage. At sixteen, Laurette was twenty years younger than her husband. They had two children, Dwight and Marguerite.

After starring in a series of melodramas penned by Taylor – including From Rags to Riches and Queen of the Highway – Laurette left him in 1907, and returned to New York with her children. She made her Broadway debut in The Great John Ganton (1909.) The play folded after two months, but she would marry its author in 1912.

‘Peg O’ My Heart’ (1912)

John Hartley Manners was a British-born playwright of Irish descent. In December 1912, Laurette began an 18-month run in Peg O’ My Heart, a sentimental comedy-drama written for her by Manners. Her role as Peg O’Connell – an Irish peasant girl left a fortune by her English uncle – was revived in 1921, and her famed performance survives in a silent film directed by King Vidor. Laurette went on to star in Happiness and One Night in Rome, also written by Manners and filmed in the early 1920s. She performed scenes from Shakespeare at the Criterion Theatre in 1918; played the lover of King Charles II in Sweet Nell of Old Drury (1923); and starred in a 1925 revival of Sir Arthur Wing Pinero’s Trelawny of the Wells.

‘One Night in Rome’ (1924)

Considered one of the finest actresses of her generation, Laurette was also known for erratic behaviour and heavy drinking. After spending a weekend at her home, Noel Coward was inspired to write the hit comedy, Hay Fever, about the madcap antics of an eccentric theatrical family. Laurette never spoke to Coward again.

Her Cardboard Lover was an adaptation of Jacques Deval’s romantic comedy about Simone Lagorce, the mistress of a man who will never divorce his wife. Laurette was cast as Simone, with Englishman Leslie Howard playing Andre, her love interest. Rehearsals began in August 1926 at Laurette’s Easthampton home. In her memoir, Leslie Ruth Howard recalled her father saying he felt Taylor didn’t trust producers Gilbert Miller and A.H. Woods, and that Deval’s hostile attitude hampered her performance. Seemingly miscast, Laurette was ill at ease as the show played in Washington D.C. and Atlantic City. Howard found their intimate scenes “painful to endure.”

The producers decided to close the show in Baltimore, promising a major rewrite and a swift reopening. Assuming that her run-of-the-play contract was guaranteed, Laurette considered a six-week offer on the vaudeville circuit, but when Jane Cowl was rumoured as her replacement, Laurette demanded that Her Cardboard Lover open in New York immediately, with herself in the lead. The producers refused, and she filed charges for breach of contract with Actors Equity. On January 15, 1927, Actors Equity found in her favour. She relinquished the role, and was awarded $4,000. Woods and Miller were freed from their obligations, but without a suitable actress to play Simone. The script was then sent to Jeanne Eagels, who accepted the role.

Jeanne Eagels replaced Taylor in ‘Her Cardboard Lover’ (1927)

Laurette had much in common with Jeanne Eagels, who just finished a triumphant run as Sadie Thompson in Rain – a role with which she would be forever associated. Seven years younger than Laurette, Jeanne also started her career in a road company, and it is believed she was briefly married to her boss, Maurice Dubinsky. She was typecast in ingénue parts – not dissimilar to Peg O’ My Heart – before her breakthrough in Rain, and was known for her mercurial personality. The two actresses had headed the cast of Evening of Happiness, a one-off benefit performance for the Actors Fund, at Brooklyn’s Montauk Theatre back in 1922.

“In the part originally played by Laurette Taylor, Miss Eagels is none too happily cast,” Brooks Atkinson wrote in the New York Times after Her Cardboard Lover opened at the Empire Theatre on March 21. “As the temperamental Simone, Miss Eagels has rather to create a part from the very lightest substance.” The play closed in July before a nationwide tour in October, enjoying better reviews and a new leading man. In March 1928, however, an exhausted Jeanne was fired after a week’s absence, and slapped with a rather severe eighteen-month ban from the legitimate stage by Actors Equity. She died in October 1929.

‘The Glass Menagerie’ (1946)

Laurette’s later life would also be marred by tragedy after losing her husband in December 1928, as her struggle with alcoholism continued, and her career stalled. In 1932, she starred in a double bill of one-act plays by J.M. Barrie. She also appeared in a 1938 revival of Outward Bound, directed by Otto Preminger. Her final role, as Amanda Wingfield in the original production of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie (1945), is regarded as one of the defining moments in the history of American acting.

On December 7, 1946, Laurette Taylor died of a coronary thrombosis. She is interred at the Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York.

Leslie Howard Steiner was born in Forest Hill, South London, on April 3, 1893. His mother, Lillian Blumberg, came from an upper middle-class family who initially disapproved of her choice of husband, the Hungarian Ferdinand Steiner. The Steiners briefly moved to Vienna, returning to London when the rift was healed. They had four more children, and changed their name to the less Germanic ‘Stainer’ at the outbreak of World War I.

Leslie was first educated from home, then at Alleyn’s School in Dulwich. An average student, he was encouraged by his mother in his love of writing and theatre. But his father insisted he take a conventional job, and he worked as a bank clerk before enlisting in the British Army. However, his service came to an end when he suffered shellshock in 1916. That year he married Ruth Evelyn Martin, and they later had two children.

He began acting on the London stage, and touring, in popular plays like Peg O’ My Heart, Charley’s Aunt and East is West, before crossing the Atlantic to try his luck on Broadway. In 1920 he founded British Comedy Films, producing and acting in several shorts. His early successes on the New York stage included A.A. Milne’s The Truth About Blayds and The Romantic Age (1922); and Outward Bound (1924.)

With Katherine Cornell in ‘The Green Hat’ (1925)

In 1925, he appeared in A.H. Wood’s production of The Green Hat, adapted from Michael Arlen’s bestselling novel and starring Katherine Cornell. Howard’s next play was also produced by Woods, and would make him a star. Her Cardboard Lover was based on Jacques Deval’s romantic comedy about Simone Lagorce, a Parisian boutique owner unhappily involved with a married man. Desperate to end the affair, Simone hires Andre, an impoverished young gambler, to act as a buffer between herself and her former paramour, and finds herself falling in love with him.

With Jeanne Eagels in ‘Her Cardboard Lover’ (1927)

On March 21, Her Cardboard Lover opened at the Empire Theatre, with Jeanne Eagels as Simone. “After a shaky start, Miss Eagels swept it away magnificently, playing several scenes with an almost fey charm and delicacy and plunging into the romp of the comedy with true comic spirit,” Alexander Woollcott observed in his column for the New York World. “Only to experience, when she responded to the booming calls at the end of the penultimate act, the pang of hearing that unruly audience yell ‘Howard, Howard’ …”

Another critic, Percy Hammond, reported that “the star, with apparent pleasure at her leading man’s popularity, stepped to the footlights and said, ‘I thank you on behalf of my cardboard lover.’”

But in general, the press was no kinder than the audience. While some appreciated Jeanne’s venture into light comedy, most singled out Howard’s performance as the one to watch, and he became the target of her pent-up fury. She ordered the stage manager to move his dressing room across the theatre. When their paths did cross, she ignored him. Even onstage, Leslie wasn’t safe.

On July 18, the producers announced that Her Cardboard Lover would close in twelve days and reopen in Chicago in late September. Rumours had been circulating for a month that Howard wanted to quit the show, but management denied this, saying he would join the supporting cast on tour. Burns Mantle’s August 7 column suggested that Leslie would no longer have to endure the slings and arrows of his former leading lady, as the actor was currently mounting his own play, Murray Hill, and had plans to open in John Galsworthy’s Escape come November.

With Tallulah Bankhead in the London production of ‘Her Cardboard Lover’ (1928)

Howard had said goodbye to Jeanne but not Andre. Her Cardboard Lover moved to London in 1928, where he recreated his ‘smash success’ with Tallulah Bankhead. They were alleged to have become lovers, and despite his long marriage, Leslie was widely regarded as a ladies’ man. Meanwhile, Jeanne Eagels began a nationwide tour of Her Cardboard Lover in October, with another Englishman, Anthony Bushell, replacing Howard.

His next West End play, Berkeley Square – about a young American transported to London to meet his ancestors at the time of the American Revolution – was another hit, later transferring to Broadway. In a 1930 adaptation of Outward Bound, he made the transition from stage to screen, establishing himself as a romantic lead opposite Norma Shearer in A Free Soul (1931) and Smilin’ Through (1932); and as an adventure hero in The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934), while the 1935 adaptation of Berkeley Square earned him an Oscar nomination.

With Humphrey Bogart and Bette Davis in ‘The Petrified Forest’ (1936)

In 1936, Leslie insisted that Humphrey Bogart, his co-star in The Petrified Forest, be allowed to recreate the role on the screen. Howard’s final Broadway appearance, in Hamlet, was overshadowed by a rival production starring John Gielgud. He acted in some important British films, including the 1934 adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s novel, Of Human Bondage, co-starring Bette Davis; and as Professor Henry Higgins in the 1938 version of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. In 1939, Leslie starred opposite Ingrid Bergman in her Hollywood debut, Intermezzo; and also played his most famous role, as Ashley Wilkes in Gone With the Wind.

With Vivien Leigh in ‘Gone With the Wind’ (1939)

As World War II broke out, Howard returned to England. He wrote, produced, directed and starred in a number of morale-boosting films, including the 1940 documentary short, Common Heritage; and the war-themed Pimpernel Smith (1941), The First of the Few (1942), and The Gentler Sex (1943.) He also contributed to Powell and Pressburger’s 49^th Parallel (1941) and Noel Coward’s In Which We Serve (1942.)

Leslie Howard died, aged fifty, on June 1, 1943, while flying home from Portugal. The aircraft was shot down by a Luftwaffe over the Bay of Biscay, killing seventeen people. No bodies were recovered, but a monument to the victims was later built in Spain, close to where the tragedy occurred.

Augustus George Andrews was born in London on April 10, 1868. He was educated at Harrow, one of Britain’s leading public schools. He worked for the publishing house owned by his father, William Joseph Arliss Andrews, before leaving at eighteen to pursue a life on the stage. After a long apprenticeship in provincial theatre, George Arliss established himself as a supporting actor in London’s West End.

In 1899, Arliss married actress Florence ‘Flo’ Montgomery Smith, who became his frequent leading lady. On her advice, he sailed to New York in 1901 with a troupe led by Mrs Patrick Campbell. He went on to join another company led by a female entrepreneur, Mrs Fiske. In 1908, the forty year-old Arliss finally achieved stardom in The Devil. Three years later, he was cast in what would become his most celebrated role – Disraeli – a portrait of the nineteenth century British Prime Minister that had been tailored for Arliss, enjoying an extraordinary five-year run on Broadway and beyond.

‘Disraeli’ (1911)

After two months on tour, actress Margery Maude was leaving to appear in another production. Arliss was excluded from the decision, except in his choice of replacement. He was less concerned with acting ability and beauty than the weight of the actress, because in one scene he would have to carry her across the stage. After stating at her audition that she weighed 117 pounds, Jeanne Eagels was asked to jump into the actor’s arms to prove it.

During rehearsals, Jeanne expressed strong opinions on how her role was to be played. While this infuriated the seasoned thespian, Arliss also saw a spark of genius in the twenty-six year-old actress and took her ideas seriously. For her part, Eagels found Arliss too methodical – even fussy – although she came to respect his devotion to the craft.

‘The Professor’s Love Story’ (1917)

The Professor’s Love Story opened at the Knickerbocker Theatre on February 26. Jeanne would be pulling double duty over the following weeks: filming in New Jersey by day, and treading the boards on Broadway at night. The play closed on April 7. By then, Jeanne had been cast in Arliss’ revival of Disraeli, due to open on April 9. She and Arliss had performed the final act on March 30, during an Anti-Vivisection Benefit held at the Knickerbocker.

Arliss’ signature piece re-enacted Benjamin Disraeli’s attempt to gain control of the Suez Canal through finance. Jeanne was to play Lady Clarissa Pevensey, replacing Elsie Leslie in the original production. Lady Clarissa was one of several fictional characters created to support the leading man, and critics found Jeanne “delightful” in her aristocratic role. Disraeli’s Broadway run ended in the third week of May. This must have been a great relief to Jeanne, who was already working on another film.

‘Hamilton’ (1917)

The final Arliss-Eagels collaboration was co-written by Arliss and inspired by the life of Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasury during George Washington’s first Administration. Jeanne was cast as Maria Reynolds, Hamilton’s erstwhile mistress, while Florence Arliss played Mrs. Hamilton. Mrs. Reynolds’ husband, a former Commissary officer of the American Revolution, blackmailed Hamilton over the affair. Hamilton opened in Atlantic City’s Apollo Theatre on September 6, transferring to the Knickerbocker Theatre eleven days later. The play closed in New York after eighty performances and proceeded to tour until April 1918.

George Arliss had nothing but praise for his co-star. “Three distinct parts, each played with unerring judgement and artistry!” he said. “She has the vital sense of time. Hers was the talent of making a role a character, epitomizing biography and stepping on to the stage as a person, not a part.” Like Arliss, Eagels would become indelibly associated with one role in particular: that of Sadie Thompson in Rain.

Florence Arliss with Jeanne Eagels in ‘Hamilton’

Arliss made his movie debut with a silent adaptation of The Devil in 1921, followed by Disraeli, with Louise Huff as Clarissa. He scored another Broadway success as the Rajah of Rukh in The Green Goddess, which also transferred to the screen. His final stage roles were in John Galsworthy’s Old English (1924), and as Shylock in a 1928 revival of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.

In 1929, Arliss remade Disraeli as a talking picture, with Florence Arliss reprising her role as Lady Beaconsfield, and a young Joan Bennett as Clarissa. Arliss was given unprecedented artistic control for an actor in the studio era. Working closely with Darryl F. Zanuck – first at Warner Brothers, and later at Zanuck’s newly-formed 20th Century Pictures – Arliss was permitted to choose his director and co-stars, and rewrite scripts. In Alexander Hamilton (1931), June Collyer played Maria Reynolds, the role created by Jeanne Eagels. In 1932, Arliss helped launch the career of an actress often compared to Eagels, when he insisted that newcomer Bette Davis be cast in The Man Who Played God.

Arliss with Bette Davis in ‘The Man Who Played God’ (1932)

The Arlisses starred in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1938 radio production of Disraeli before travelling to London in April 1939. The outbreak of World War II prevented the couple from returning to America, and in 1941, Arliss was prosecuted under a new British law for failing to report his bank accounts in the US and Canada. He remained in London throughout the Blitz years, before settling in Pangbourne, Berkshire.

George Arliss died, aged seventy-seven, of a bronchial ailment in Maida Hill, London, on February 5, 1946. He is buried in the All Saints churchyard at Harrow Weald. His wife, Florence, passed away in 1950.

Anthony Arnatt Bushell was born in Westerham, Kent on May 19, 1904. He was educated at Magdalen College School, and later Hertford College in Oxford. He was a champion boxer, rower, and member of the Hypocrites Club, infamous for its wild parties. After graduating, Bushell trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and made his theatrical debut in Diplomacy (1924), opposite Gerald Du Maurier.

In October 1927, Bushell crossed the Atlantic to star in Her Cardboard Lover, replacing fellow Englishman Leslie Howard. His leading lady was Jeanne Eagels. After a four-month run on Broadway, Her Cardboard Lover – based on Jacques Deval’s romantic comedy, with additional material by P.G. Wodehouse – was set for a nationwide tour. Bushell’s role as Andre, an impoverished gambler hired by a Parisian divorcee (Eagels) to act as a buffer between herself and her former husband (Barry O’Neill), was considered the best part, and Howard’s exit had been partly been caused by his rivalry with Jeanne.

She would later claim that Bushell was recommended to her by Edward, Prince of Wales during a trip abroad in the summer of 1926. This cannot have been correct, however, because Eagels had spent the previous summer touring America in her great success, Rain. Prince Edward had attended an earlier performance during his trip to New York in 1924.

As Her Cardboard Lover began its tour with stops in Syracuse, Buffalo, and Newark, Jeanne finally won the critical acclaim denied to her during the play’s initial run. Without Leslie Howard to steal her thunder, the show was running smoothly. “Once the audience had decided to take the play as a bit of nonsense – and it was that – it just settled back to have a good time,” the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported, adding, “the star was ably assisted by Anthony Bushell, a good-looking youngster …”

In January 1928, Her Cardboard Lover received a mixed review from the Boston Globe. Once again, Eagels was overshadowed: “When Leslie Howard acted this role in New York he fairly ran away with the honors of the performance. Here the part is very agreeably played by Anthony Bushell, a personable young English actor.” In February, the Chicago Tribune noted, “Anthony Bushell is pleasant, engaging and fairly expert.”

Jeanne Eagels in ‘Her Cardboard Lover’

While this might have bothered Jeanne a few months earlier, she now had more pressing matters on her mind. This was made clear when a press statement announced that she was divorcing her husband. On March 11, the company arrived in Milwaukee for a week’s run at the Davidson Theatre. However, on opening night it was announced that Eagels was unable to perform, due to severe ptomaine poisoning. The Davidson Theatre remained dark all week. Jeanne was confined to her room at the Milwaukee Plaza Hotel, accepting no calls or visitors. It was hoped that she would recover in time for the St. Louis opening on March 19, but when the company left, Jeanne remained at the Plaza.

The main reason behind Jeanne’s self-imposed seclusion, according to press-agent John Montague, was unrequited love. “Miss Eagels fell in love like she did everything else – tempestuously,” he observed, “and when the youth of her choice showed a preference for another woman, she shot up like a sky-rocket and carried the stick – which was her career – up with her.” Montague didn’t name the object of her infatuation, but he was most likely Barry O’Neill, who at twenty-nine was eight years her junior, rather than the twenty-three year-old Bushell.

Not knowing when, or even if their star would be ready to resume Her Cardboard Lover, the producers cancelled the rest of the tour and the cast headed back to New York. Meanwhile, Actors Equity filed charges against Eagels, on April 6, she was suspended from any union production for eighteen months.

Bushell married actress Zelma O’Neal, and in November, made his Broadway debut in W. Somerset Maugham’s The Sacred Flame, starring Conrad Nagel and Lila Lee. It folded in December after just twenty-four performances. Meanwhile, Jeanne Eagels signed a contract with Paramount Pictures, and her first talking picture, The Letter (another Maugham vehicle) opened to acclaim in March 1929.

Bushell with Jeanne Eagels in ‘Jealousy’ (1929)

Paramount announced on February 2 that they had purchased Jealousy, a play by Louis Verneuil, for Jeanne’s next picture. The storyline focused on Yvonne, newly married to Pierre, a poor and temperamental artist. Anthony Bushell was cast as Pierre. With Jeanne among colleagues who knew and respected her, Jealousy should have progressed comfortably, but after executives saw the finished product, they became concerned with Bushell’s performance. Published reports implied that his voice hadn’t adapted well to the sound equipment, and he was subsequently replaced by Fredric March. An editorial in Photoplay may have revealed the truth when posing this cryptic question: “Did you ever hear of a film actress being so tempestuously good that her work dangerously overshadowed that of her leading man?”

In a strange twist of fate, the revered English actor George Arliss, whom Eagels had supported during his theatrical tour of Disraeli twelve years before, insisted Bushell be cast as the romantic juvenile in the screen adaptation, after seeing his performance in The Sacred Flame. Joan Bennett took the role formerly played by Jeanne. Disraeli was released in November 1929: two months after Jealousy’s opening, and only a month after Eagels’ tragic death.

Bushell with George Arliss in ‘Disraeli’ (1929)

With Joan Bennett in ‘Disraeli’

In James Whale’s anti-war film, Journey’s End (1930), Bushell played the first of many military roles. In Five Star Final (1931), a pre-code exposé of newspaper corruption, he supported Edward G. Robinson. Bushell played Captain Dobbin in his last American film, a 1932 adaptation of William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair.

Back in Britain, he continued making films, including The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934), which starred Leslie Howard (the original Andre from Her Cardboard Lover.) His marriage to Zelma O’Neal ended in 1936, and in 1937, he appeared with Vivien Leigh in Dark Journey.

When World War II broke out in 1939, thirty-five year-old Bushell joined the British Army. He was commissioned in the Welsh Guards and served in the Guards Armoured Division as a tank squadron commander. During the war, he married an heiress whom, according to actor David Niven, had been the wife of a fellow officer. After being demobbed in 1945, he was known as Major Bushell.

Bushell on the set of Olivier’s ‘Hamlet’, 1948

He returned to film and began a long association with Sir Laurence Olivier, working as assistant producer on Hamlet (1948), in which Olivier starred and also directed. Bushell played a bomb disposal expert in Powell and Pressburger’s The Small Back Room (1948), and made his directorial debut with The Angel With the Trumpet (1950), followed by The Long Dark Hall in 1951.

In 1956, he played a wily politician in another Powell and Pressburger film, The Battle of the River Plate; and was an associate director on George Cukor’s Bhowani Junction, as well as another Olivier project, The Prince and the Showgirl, overseeing scenes in which the actor-director performed. Bushell may have been reminded of his difficulties with Jeanne Eagels almost thirty years before, as the production was rife with tension between Olivier and his co-star, Marilyn Monroe.

“Tony looks like a bluff military man – bald, red-faced and jovial,” Colin Clark (an assistant director) noted in his diary, later published as The Prince, the Showgirl and Me. “In fact he was in the Guards during the war and almost everyone forgets he is an actor … I don’t think Tony could direct traffic in Cheltenham. Despite his imposing appearance he is really a pussy cat. But [Olivier] needs a chum to guard his rear, as it were, and it is a great joy to have Tony around. He has a heart the size of a house which he loves to hide behind a glare.”

Bushell was cast as the Captain of Carpathia in A Night to Remember, Roy Ward Baker’s 1958 film about the Titanic disaster; and in 1959, he played Colonel Breen in the classic sci-fi television series, Quatermass and the Pit. Later that year, he directed several episodes of The Third Man, a BBC adaptation of Grahame Greene’s novel. He directed Christopher Lee in The Terror of the Tongs (1961), and produced a 1962 series about the explorer, Sir Francis Drake.

By the late 1960s, he had retired from the film industry. He continued to enjoy a busy social life, and became a director of the Monte Carlo Golf Club. Anthony Bushell died aged ninety-two in Oxford on April 2, 1997.