A book covering her career is titled Bad Girl Of Film Noir – she was the bad girl who got involved with the bad guy and usually came to a bad end. Her biography is called Suicide Blonde. It is full of pain.
Perhaps only twice in more than 50 movies does she find herself with a good guy who wants to do her good. The first was in 1946. The director Frank Capra wanted “a young blonde sexpot” for his film It’s A Wonderful Life. Gloria, 23, was that sexpot: Violet Bick. She announces herself with one of the flirtiest saunters on celluloid.
Clearly a girl looking for trouble she attracts and disturbs the benign George Bailey (James Stewart), everyone’s guardian angel. Prompted by a dream where he sees her arrested as a prostitute he lends her the money for a better life and saves her. Heartwarming.
But heartwarming isn’t how moviegoers remember Gloria Grahame. Her most famous scene comes in The Big Heat (1953), which she starred in with Glenn Ford, when Lee Marvin throws boiling coffee into her face and scars her horribly. In The Bad And The Beautiful (1952), for which she won a best supporting actress Oscar, she gets killed a plane crash. In A Lonely Place (1950) is a movie it’s hard to forget: Humphrey Bogart, her near-psycho boyfriend, could finish her off at any moment.
Gloria’s own life was painful and bizarre. She had four marriages, three of them with men who were emotionally and physically violent and the fourth with her stepson. Incidentally she had been caught in bed with him when he was 13.
In Stars Don’t Die In Liverpool, Gloria (played by Annette Bening) is kissed by Peter (Jamie Bell)
In the movie Film Stars Don’t Die In Liverpool, which opens in cinemas on Thursday, Gloria (beautifully played by Annette Bening) meets her sweetest onscreen man since It’s A Wonderful Life, Peter Turner (played by Jamie Bell). This is fact not fiction. It’s 1978 and Gloria Grahame’s major film career is ancient history.
Like many once-famous American actresses she is offered work in England. She is 55 and staying in an unglamorous flat in a house in north-west London, preparing to play Sadie Thompson in Somerset Maugham’s Rain at the Palace Theatre, Watford. She’s nervous about it. She’s hardly acted on stage before.
Peter Turner, a struggling actor 20 years younger, is living in a room at the top of the house. One morning Gloria sees him hovering in the hall. They hadn’t met. “Oh, hi,” she says, “have you seen Saturday Night Fever, did you like it? I have to take a dance class. Come in and hustle with me.”
So he does. It was the beginning of a love story. The song was Staying Alive, which is more or less what Gloria was doing. Diagnosed with breast cancer she had refused chemo because she would lose her hair and had kept her illness a secret. She never told Peter.
They fell in love but it wasn’t just Peter who came to love Gloria. His mum and dad, working class Liverpudlians who remembered her from the local Odeon as the famous bad girl, doted on her. She was welcomed into their home. Peter also spent time with her in New York.
Gloria Grahame stars with James Stewart in It’s A Wonderful Life
These were happy days, lots of fun, until his concern about her failing health clashed painfully with her secretiveness and denial. It was time for them to part.
Two years later the Turners in Liverpool got an emergency call from nearby Lancaster. Gloria had collapsed, she was terribly ill. Peter, who didn’t even know she was in England, brought her back to the family house where the Turners cared for her. She wouldn’t admit it but she was close to death. The story of Peter and Gloria wasn’t public knowledge. Perhaps it would have been considered pathetic and inappropriate, what with the age difference and her notoriety. But her fame was too long gone for anyone to even notice. A few years after her death in 1981 Peter went to Los Angeles to visit her grave. He came back to London, bought a 1950s desk and an old typewriter from a junk shop and wrote a lovely book.
It was a complete surprise. He had never written anything before. The story is beautifully told and the title is unbeatable. Here’s how it came about. Peter was in a play in Liverpool and getting to the theatre on time was a struggle. “In a bit of a rush again tonight, are we?” Old Jack [the stage manager] peered at me through the open door of his office.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” I said, “I’ve got a bit of a problem someone’s dying.”
“Oooh, anyone I know?” “I shouldn’t think so. She’s American. She’s a film star.”
With mad screen boyfriend Humphrey Bogart, In A Lonely Place
“Let’s not be silly,” he said. “Film stars don’t die in Liverpool.”
True. She was flown back to New York and died a day later.
Gloria Grahame said she never understood Hollywood. She didn’t do what film stars were supposed to do. When she went to collect her Oscar she didn’t make a speech, she just said “thank you” and hurried off the stage and talked to nobody. She was difficult.
She had always lacked selfconfidence and blamed herself when things went wrong. She was never sure about her looks: she didn’t like her chin and she had work done on her upper lip rendering it immobile. She became known as “the girl with the novocaine lip”.
She was drawn to controlling and abusive men and of her four husbands at least three were deeply unsatisfactory. Only one, Nicholas Ray, was famous. He directed In A Lonely Place. He also made Rebel Without A Cause among many notable films. Theirs was a crazed relationship with alcohol, drugs, Nick’s incessant gambling and not helped by Nick finding her in bed with his young son Tony. Later, as we know, she and Tony married.
Glenn Ford gives her the eye in The Big Heat before she is attacked
Her milieu was black-and-white thrillers but probably her mostseen performances were as the elephant girl in The Greatest Show On Earth or in the film Oklahoma! as “I’m just a girl who can’t say no” Ado Annie. She couldn’t really sing (it was a long-winded nightmare to get that song right) yet in at least two black-and-white movies she plays nightclub singers with her voice dubbed by others. Why? Because though not conventionally beautiful she absolutely projected sex.
Though she was an American star she came of historic English stock, descended from John of Gaunt. Her paternal grandfather Reginald Hallward was a painter and friend of Oscar Wilde. Seeing Hallward finishing a portrait of a beautiful young man was inspiration for Wilde’s The Picture Of Dorian Gray.
The artist in the story is called Basil Hallward, a sinister figure eventually murdered by Dorian. “Why did you make me so bad in the book?” Hallward asked him. “Reggie,” Oscar replied, “I just wanted to make you famous.”
You could say the same about Hollywood and Gloria.
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