Laura
I watched Laura this weekend.
For many people, Gene Tierney will always be Laura - the mysteriously seductive actress who played the title role in Otto Preminger's classic film noir, backed by one of the most famous movie theme tunes ever written. For the movie buff, Gene is also the principal attraction in a series of highly regarded pictures from the 1940s: 'The Ghost And Mrs Muir', 'Leave Her to Heaven', 'Son of Fury', and perhaps one or two others.
Of course, most of the films in which she appeared were routine first features which have dated fast and consequently fallen into semi-obscurity (at least judging by TV showings and video availability). Yet no matter how trivial some of these productions may have been, Gene's gorgeous, glowing presence makes every scene of hers a joy to watch. To take just one example, if the 1951 comedy 'The Mating Season' transcends its workaday script and still delights TV audiences today, it has to do not only with the inspired casting of Thelma Ritter and John Lund, but with the heart-quickening scenes in which Gene is rescued from a clifftop car accident, sings at the piano or demonstrates wifely affection for her bemused and distracted on-screen husband. To put it another way, when you have the privilege of seeing "the most beautiful woman in movie history" (as Darryl F. Zanuck described her) in all her glory on the screen, you can forgive any number of shortcomings the movie may otherwise have - since, in the words of Marceau Devillers, "her extraordinary presence makes her the heart and soul of every one of her films".
"I always had a thing about Gene Tierney"
(Julian Barnes, English novelist)
Gene Tierney's beauty has always attracted more attention than her qualities as an actress. You may disagree with the critic Frieda Grafe's sweeping assertion that 'her diction is monotonous', but it is true that when a script calls for a passionate outburst her intonation can sometimes be a little strained; and that in some of her early films she conceals her nervousness behind a mask-like facial inexpressiveness à la Hedy Lamarr. On the other hand, with a good director and a good role she was able to rise magnificently to the occasion - her performance in 'Laura', for example, is quite simply flawless, and her inspired incarnation of Ellen in 'Leave Her to Heaven' earned her the immediate praise of Noel Coward, and the (somewhat grudging) admiration of film critics in decades to follow. The fact that her reputation and popularity were able to survive so many second-rate films is itself, as Zanuck pointed out, sufficient testimony to her talents as an actress. With a series of unpromising scripts, and with her performances frequently bedevilled by health problems (e.g. while filming ' Belle Starr' she was suffering from an allergy, and 'The Ghost and Mrs Muir' was made while she was convalescing from a broken ankle), she acquired a reputation for professionalism that earned her the nickname 'one-take Tierney'. To sum up, she was, at the very least, a gifted and conscientious performer whose acting skills have rarely been given the recognition they deserve - perhaps owing to her own characteristic humility, but also because her physical beauty is so distracting that you seldom stop to think about the art with which she dignifies mediocre scripts and discreetly but memorably incarnates an extremely varied array of characters.
In addition to all this, she was in real life charming, intelligent and cultivated, surprisingly modest and free from malice. There are no scandalous revelations or bitchy remarks about other actors or actresses in her autobiography (perhaps that's why it's out of print): rarely does she mention a fellow entertainer without expressing respect or admiration for his or her talents. How many other Hollywood stars turned autobiographers could say the same?
An Unhappy Life
Gene Tierney was, during the 1940s, celebrated as one of the world's most beautiful women. She was also, during a lengthy period of her life, a desperately unhappy person who passively allowed herself to be treated with all the primitive methods of the psychiatric institutions in which she was repeatedly hospitalised - including 27 sessions of ECT.
That she survived all this to enjoy a relatively peaceful and contented old age in the company of her second husband, Howard Lee, surely demonstrates a remarkable strength of spirit. There can be few things more poignant than the pages in which this international Hollywood star, admired and desired by millions, describes her prolonged periods of incarceration in mental institutions during the 1950s - and her characteristically generous preoccupation, while there, with alleviating the sufferings of other less fortunate 'patients' by whatever means she could.
How could a woman made to be loved and admired, whose effortless conquests included the likes of John F. Kennedy or the millionaire Howard Hughes have come to this? Part of the answer lies in a key event in her life which seems to be drawn straight from the pages of a well-known Agatha Christie novel. In June 1943, with her marriage to Oleg Cassini interrupted by a gruelling string of wartime charity engagements, she went down with German measles; four months later she gave birth prematurely to Daria, a little girl who was soon found to be deaf-mute and mentally handicapped as a direct result of the illness caught during pregnancy. It was many years later - years of disappointment, regret, endless consultations with doctors and bills for expensive specialised care - when, quite by chance, she met a female fan who gushingly recounted how, in the throes of a German measles infection many years before, she had escaped quarantine in order to attend the wartime ‘Hollywood Canteen’ and thus make personal contact with ‘her favourite star’.
Among the other formative events in Gene’s life, she herself laid great emphasis on one which, to some people, may not seem particularly noteworthy: the discovery, during her early years as an actress, that her father had for some time been having an extramarital affair. To understand the significance of this to her, we need to remember that Gene had been brought up not only believing in strict Methodist religious principles, but looking up to her father (with his encouragement) as the living embodiment of them. For those people who like to find biographical reflections in films, it would be difficult not to draw a parallel between the oedipal obsession of Ellen in ‘Leave Her to Heaven’ (which Gene regarded as her best film) and the anguish which the discovery of her father’s imperfection seems to have caused the actress in real life. Unfortunately, this was only the first of many disappointments with men. The infidelities of her first husband, the fashion designer Oleg Cassini (which may be partly accounted for by enforced separation during the war), and the disappointing outcomes of her affairs with John F. Kennedy and international playboy Ali Khan, ensured that Gene was not to find marital stability and contentment until her second marriage, late in life, with Howard Lee , Texan oil tycoon and ex-husband of Hedy Lamarr . It is both strange and ironic that a woman worshipped by thousands of devoted admirers should have been so exceptionally unfortunate in her choice of men. Or as detective Mark MacPherson put it in ‘Laura’, 'for a charming intelligent girl, you’ve certainly surrounded yourself with a remarkable collection of dopes'...
Gene Tierney, according to the unanimous opinion of critics, studio publicists and fashion writers of her day, was ‘exotic’. What the 20th Century Fox publicists meant by this becomes clear when you consider that her film roles included an Arab princess, a Chinese girl, a Polynesian, an Argentinian, an Italian, two Russians and an Egyptian - and that even the American roles she played often had a ‘cosmopolitan’ air about them (e.g. in ‘The Mating Season’ she is characteristically cast as an ambassador’s daughter who has lived in China and who can also sing an Edith Piaf song in French with flawless pronunciation). There is certainly something Eastern, something mysterious, inscrutable and even disturbing, about the Tierney facial features. But while on the one hand the ‘teardrop shape of her eyes’ (Michael Atkinson) and her high cheekbones led to a studio obsession with her ‘Oriental’ possibilities, her entrancing elegance and refined manners meant that she was also seen as an ideal choice for a beautiful Society Lady - hence ‘Laura’. These confused and to some extent contradictory perceptions of her, on the part of her studio, perhaps explain the wide diversity of roles she was called upon to perform - grass-skirted Polynesian native, gun-toting Southern Belle, Victorian English lady, innocent wife of Russian spy, spoilt and pampered American society girl, ragged country wench, etc - as Fox struggled to find a satisfactory way of classifying and ‘marketing’ her, meanwhile regarding her as a convenient, versatile standby for second-rate films, and only rarely offering her the star roles which her reputation and popularity during the 1940s amply justified.
"She was fascinating... incredibly beautiful"
(Terenci Moix, Catalan novelist)
Michael Atkinson, in a more recent attempt at a definition, expressed the same sense of bewilderment invariably evoked by the beauty of Gene Tierney, placing her 'somewhere between... shy high school sweetheart and man-eater'. It is partly this duality, this extraordinary synthesis of sensual Oriental allure with Swiss finishing-school grace and poise, which makes her screen presence so powerful, so unique. The Tierney that we see dancing in an island clearing in ‘Son of Fury’, displays a ‘helpless sensuality’ (Frieda Grafe) that lifts the whole scene out of here's-one-for-the-tourists staginess and into the realms of erotic myth. Those coyly lowered eyes, sideways shimmy, that sudden smile - the celebrated Tierney overbite - all combine to make up what must be one of the most alluring scenes in 1940s cinema. But if she knew how to be devastatingly sexy, she also knew how to be elegant ('The Razor's Edge'), mysterious ('Laura'), passionate ('Shanghai Gesture') or even wicked and perverse ('Leave Her to Heaven')... What Gene Tierney had, in fact, was a mixture of apparently contradictory qualities which no other actress before or since has succeeded in combining in quite the same way - refinement, charm, innocence, sensuality, a timeless beauty... And if all this were not enough, the fact that she appears in two undisputed film classics - ‘Laura’ and ‘The Ghost and Mrs Muir’ - accompanied by two of the finest film scores (by David Raksin and Bernard Herrmann, respectively) Hollywood has yet produced - guarantees that she will never be forgotten as long as successive generations of audiences are given the chance to fall in love all over again with 'Laura... the face in the misty light'.
For many people, Gene Tierney will always be Laura - the mysteriously seductive actress who played the title role in Otto Preminger's classic film noir, backed by one of the most famous movie theme tunes ever written. For the movie buff, Gene is also the principal attraction in a series of highly regarded pictures from the 1940s: 'The Ghost And Mrs Muir', 'Leave Her to Heaven', 'Son of Fury', and perhaps one or two others.
Of course, most of the films in which she appeared were routine first features which have dated fast and consequently fallen into semi-obscurity (at least judging by TV showings and video availability). Yet no matter how trivial some of these productions may have been, Gene's gorgeous, glowing presence makes every scene of hers a joy to watch. To take just one example, if the 1951 comedy 'The Mating Season' transcends its workaday script and still delights TV audiences today, it has to do not only with the inspired casting of Thelma Ritter and John Lund, but with the heart-quickening scenes in which Gene is rescued from a clifftop car accident, sings at the piano or demonstrates wifely affection for her bemused and distracted on-screen husband. To put it another way, when you have the privilege of seeing "the most beautiful woman in movie history" (as Darryl F. Zanuck described her) in all her glory on the screen, you can forgive any number of shortcomings the movie may otherwise have - since, in the words of Marceau Devillers, "her extraordinary presence makes her the heart and soul of every one of her films".
"I always had a thing about Gene Tierney"
(Julian Barnes, English novelist)
Gene Tierney's beauty has always attracted more attention than her qualities as an actress. You may disagree with the critic Frieda Grafe's sweeping assertion that 'her diction is monotonous', but it is true that when a script calls for a passionate outburst her intonation can sometimes be a little strained; and that in some of her early films she conceals her nervousness behind a mask-like facial inexpressiveness à la Hedy Lamarr. On the other hand, with a good director and a good role she was able to rise magnificently to the occasion - her performance in 'Laura', for example, is quite simply flawless, and her inspired incarnation of Ellen in 'Leave Her to Heaven' earned her the immediate praise of Noel Coward, and the (somewhat grudging) admiration of film critics in decades to follow. The fact that her reputation and popularity were able to survive so many second-rate films is itself, as Zanuck pointed out, sufficient testimony to her talents as an actress. With a series of unpromising scripts, and with her performances frequently bedevilled by health problems (e.g. while filming ' Belle Starr' she was suffering from an allergy, and 'The Ghost and Mrs Muir' was made while she was convalescing from a broken ankle), she acquired a reputation for professionalism that earned her the nickname 'one-take Tierney'. To sum up, she was, at the very least, a gifted and conscientious performer whose acting skills have rarely been given the recognition they deserve - perhaps owing to her own characteristic humility, but also because her physical beauty is so distracting that you seldom stop to think about the art with which she dignifies mediocre scripts and discreetly but memorably incarnates an extremely varied array of characters.
In addition to all this, she was in real life charming, intelligent and cultivated, surprisingly modest and free from malice. There are no scandalous revelations or bitchy remarks about other actors or actresses in her autobiography (perhaps that's why it's out of print): rarely does she mention a fellow entertainer without expressing respect or admiration for his or her talents. How many other Hollywood stars turned autobiographers could say the same?
An Unhappy Life
Gene Tierney was, during the 1940s, celebrated as one of the world's most beautiful women. She was also, during a lengthy period of her life, a desperately unhappy person who passively allowed herself to be treated with all the primitive methods of the psychiatric institutions in which she was repeatedly hospitalised - including 27 sessions of ECT.
That she survived all this to enjoy a relatively peaceful and contented old age in the company of her second husband, Howard Lee, surely demonstrates a remarkable strength of spirit. There can be few things more poignant than the pages in which this international Hollywood star, admired and desired by millions, describes her prolonged periods of incarceration in mental institutions during the 1950s - and her characteristically generous preoccupation, while there, with alleviating the sufferings of other less fortunate 'patients' by whatever means she could.
How could a woman made to be loved and admired, whose effortless conquests included the likes of John F. Kennedy or the millionaire Howard Hughes have come to this? Part of the answer lies in a key event in her life which seems to be drawn straight from the pages of a well-known Agatha Christie novel. In June 1943, with her marriage to Oleg Cassini interrupted by a gruelling string of wartime charity engagements, she went down with German measles; four months later she gave birth prematurely to Daria, a little girl who was soon found to be deaf-mute and mentally handicapped as a direct result of the illness caught during pregnancy. It was many years later - years of disappointment, regret, endless consultations with doctors and bills for expensive specialised care - when, quite by chance, she met a female fan who gushingly recounted how, in the throes of a German measles infection many years before, she had escaped quarantine in order to attend the wartime ‘Hollywood Canteen’ and thus make personal contact with ‘her favourite star’.
Among the other formative events in Gene’s life, she herself laid great emphasis on one which, to some people, may not seem particularly noteworthy: the discovery, during her early years as an actress, that her father had for some time been having an extramarital affair. To understand the significance of this to her, we need to remember that Gene had been brought up not only believing in strict Methodist religious principles, but looking up to her father (with his encouragement) as the living embodiment of them. For those people who like to find biographical reflections in films, it would be difficult not to draw a parallel between the oedipal obsession of Ellen in ‘Leave Her to Heaven’ (which Gene regarded as her best film) and the anguish which the discovery of her father’s imperfection seems to have caused the actress in real life. Unfortunately, this was only the first of many disappointments with men. The infidelities of her first husband, the fashion designer Oleg Cassini (which may be partly accounted for by enforced separation during the war), and the disappointing outcomes of her affairs with John F. Kennedy and international playboy Ali Khan, ensured that Gene was not to find marital stability and contentment until her second marriage, late in life, with Howard Lee , Texan oil tycoon and ex-husband of Hedy Lamarr . It is both strange and ironic that a woman worshipped by thousands of devoted admirers should have been so exceptionally unfortunate in her choice of men. Or as detective Mark MacPherson put it in ‘Laura’, 'for a charming intelligent girl, you’ve certainly surrounded yourself with a remarkable collection of dopes'...
Gene Tierney, according to the unanimous opinion of critics, studio publicists and fashion writers of her day, was ‘exotic’. What the 20th Century Fox publicists meant by this becomes clear when you consider that her film roles included an Arab princess, a Chinese girl, a Polynesian, an Argentinian, an Italian, two Russians and an Egyptian - and that even the American roles she played often had a ‘cosmopolitan’ air about them (e.g. in ‘The Mating Season’ she is characteristically cast as an ambassador’s daughter who has lived in China and who can also sing an Edith Piaf song in French with flawless pronunciation). There is certainly something Eastern, something mysterious, inscrutable and even disturbing, about the Tierney facial features. But while on the one hand the ‘teardrop shape of her eyes’ (Michael Atkinson) and her high cheekbones led to a studio obsession with her ‘Oriental’ possibilities, her entrancing elegance and refined manners meant that she was also seen as an ideal choice for a beautiful Society Lady - hence ‘Laura’. These confused and to some extent contradictory perceptions of her, on the part of her studio, perhaps explain the wide diversity of roles she was called upon to perform - grass-skirted Polynesian native, gun-toting Southern Belle, Victorian English lady, innocent wife of Russian spy, spoilt and pampered American society girl, ragged country wench, etc - as Fox struggled to find a satisfactory way of classifying and ‘marketing’ her, meanwhile regarding her as a convenient, versatile standby for second-rate films, and only rarely offering her the star roles which her reputation and popularity during the 1940s amply justified.
"She was fascinating... incredibly beautiful"
(Terenci Moix, Catalan novelist)
Michael Atkinson, in a more recent attempt at a definition, expressed the same sense of bewilderment invariably evoked by the beauty of Gene Tierney, placing her 'somewhere between... shy high school sweetheart and man-eater'. It is partly this duality, this extraordinary synthesis of sensual Oriental allure with Swiss finishing-school grace and poise, which makes her screen presence so powerful, so unique. The Tierney that we see dancing in an island clearing in ‘Son of Fury’, displays a ‘helpless sensuality’ (Frieda Grafe) that lifts the whole scene out of here's-one-for-the-tourists staginess and into the realms of erotic myth. Those coyly lowered eyes, sideways shimmy, that sudden smile - the celebrated Tierney overbite - all combine to make up what must be one of the most alluring scenes in 1940s cinema. But if she knew how to be devastatingly sexy, she also knew how to be elegant ('The Razor's Edge'), mysterious ('Laura'), passionate ('Shanghai Gesture') or even wicked and perverse ('Leave Her to Heaven')... What Gene Tierney had, in fact, was a mixture of apparently contradictory qualities which no other actress before or since has succeeded in combining in quite the same way - refinement, charm, innocence, sensuality, a timeless beauty... And if all this were not enough, the fact that she appears in two undisputed film classics - ‘Laura’ and ‘The Ghost and Mrs Muir’ - accompanied by two of the finest film scores (by David Raksin and Bernard Herrmann, respectively) Hollywood has yet produced - guarantees that she will never be forgotten as long as successive generations of audiences are given the chance to fall in love all over again with 'Laura... the face in the misty light'.
posted by Gavin Elster at 10:25 AM
7 Comments:
She did have an odd beauty, very interesting biography of her.
I didnt realize that Agatha Christie based a book on her tragic bout with German Measles and the horrible outcome in "The Mirror Crack'd"...
That is speculation. I never read that as a fact. But it is most likely as much speculation as Robert Bloch fashioning Norman Bates after Ed Gein.
I'll investigate further.
You wrote: when, quite by chance, she met a female fan who gushingly recounted how, in the throes of a German measles infection many years before, she had escaped quarantine in order to attend the wartime ‘Hollywood Canteen’ and thus make personal contact with ‘her favourite star’
Positively chilling Scotty! I love Gene and have loved her for as long as I can remember. Beauty is merely one reason. She's a local. Her schooling in regions mere steps from mine. Her life and her experiences...lightyears away.
Thank you for this thoughtful, well researched and sensitive documentation. I will be saving it.
Great post Scooty and I love your blog!
Scotty -
Ed Gein was also the basis for much of "Buffalo Bill" character in the silence of the lambs...
Great blog...
I saw the post about Colin's penis..and now we are talking about a guy who cut off your penis :)
Oy vey...
Good blog indeed! :)
Bradley
The Egel Nest
yes dear ol' Ed the Butcher of Plainfiled was the cornerstone for many a derranged film baddie. Psycho, That lamb movie you speak of and the Hooper Classic Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Go figure, aspects of one mans crimes could spawn so many films. Hmm. I'm always impressed with people who know of Ed. My personal favorite baddie was Albert Fish. "The Grey Man" Now thats a whole damn series of films. He was a mess!
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