Glorious GLORIA!
Academy Award winner Gloria Grahame was the glamorous Hollywood star whose twilight years saw her fall in love with an unknown actor from Liverpool
HOW do you know you’ve made it in Hollywood? Being cast opposite numerous great leading actors of your day? Securing a role in a movie that consistently ranks on lists of the great silver-screen classics? A nomination for an Academy Award? Winning an Academy Award? A star in your name on the Hollywood Walk of Fame?
If these are the boxes that require ticking to confirm your status as a film legend, then Gloria Grahame was up there with the best of them. Born in Pasadena, California in 1923 to the British stage actress Jean Hallward, she cut her teeth treading the boards of Broadway before embarking on a movie career on the West Coast. OSCAR-WINNING PERFORMANCE IN 1946, she featured as the flirtatious Violet Bick in It’s A Wonderful Life, and at just 24 years of age, Grahame earned her first Oscar nomination for her role in the racially charged thriller, Crossfire, alongside Robert Mitchum. Often cast in film-noir projects, she starred alongside some of Hollywood’s greatest leading men, including Humphrey Bogart, Kirk Douglas, Lee Marvin, Frank Sinatra and Jimmy Stewart, and went on to win the 1952 Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her work in The Bad and the Beautiful – despite appearing for only nine minutes on screen, she beat the favourite, Jean Hagen, who was nominated for her role in Singin’ in the Rain. Indeed, Grahame was one of the best-known screen sirens of the early 1950s, featuring in productions such as In A Lonely Place (1950), Sudden Fear (1952), Human Desire (1954), The Big Heat (1953) and Oklahoma! (1955) to great acclaim.
Of course, her glittering career brought with it a glamorous lifestyle in Tinseltown, and a series of highprofile relationships, resulting in four marriages and four children. But today, it is her romance with young British actor Peter Turner, whom she met when she returned to her theatrical roots and began working on the London stage, that has put Grahame in the spotlight once again.