Joan Crawford struggled through her “middle years,” the period during her 40s before she remade herself from aging, MGM deadweight into a fleet, journeywoman powerhouse.
Barbara Stanwyck’s second marriage, to heartthrob Robert Taylor, didn’t make sense in a lot of ways, but the pair were united by their conservative politics.
Jean Harlow was the top blonde of the 1930s, and even though she didn’t survive the decade, she’d inspire a generation of would-be platinum-haired bombshell stars.
Having left her husband to be the mistress of Romain Gary, Jean secretly gave birth to a son, and then made the movie that she thought would prove herself as an actress once and for all.
The year after Joan Crawford died, her estranged, adopted daughter Christina published a tell-all, accusing her late mother of having been an abusive monster when the cameras weren’t around.
After shooting a film with a much-changed Jean-Luc Godard, Jane Fonda travels to Vietnam, where she naively participates in a stunt that would leave her branded “Hanoi Jane” for decades.
Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff were two middle-aged, foreign, struggling actors who became huge stars thanks to Dracula and Frankenstein, the first two of a trend of monster movie hits released by Universal Studios during the 1930s.
Horne, who from the beginning of her career had associated with leftists and “agitators,” got caught up in the anti-communist insanity. One of those agitators was Paul Robeson.
