First A Star, Then An Actress Lana Turner Started Out As A Sweater-Clad Starlet With Limited Talent; Experience And Time Turned Her Into An Actress
Lana Turner was a Movie Star, period.
In fact, the expression may have been invented for the blond actress, who died Thursday in Los Angeles at the age of 75.
Like many stars of her generation, especially actresses, Turner was a studio invention - an attractive visual blank with no immediately discernable talent for acting at first but upon whom the viewer could safely - and reassuringly - project a personality and a personal fantasy.
“She was probably the very worst actress that ever made it to the top,” the film director John Cromwell said of Turner in 1969.
And the playwright Tennessee Williams once said that Hollywood’s erstwhile Sweater Girl “couldn’t act her way out of her form-fitting cashmeres.”
Well, with all due respect to these observant men, both Cromwell and Williams clearly missed the point.
What Turner achieved on screen, while far removed from the lofty accomplishments of Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn, was of no less importance. She emerged during World War II - and it was no accident that MGM’s beloved Sweater Girl was one of Hollywood’s pre-eminent pin-up girls, slugging it out with Fox’s Betty Grable for the position of Numero Uno.
Grable’s trademark was her great gams; for Turner, well, it was the way she filled out those tight sweaters.
The actress was not unaware of her appeal. Of her small part in her second film, Mervyn LeRoy’s “They Won’t Forget” (1937), she quipped: “I was just a 15-year-old kid with a bosom and a backside strolling across the screen.”
Turner’s contribution to the movies of her era were limited but precious. Her creamy blondness, her bobbing walk, that luscious sweater-clad figure and her pert, flirtatious way with “boys” made her the Julia Roberts of the 1940s. College co-eds and working women tried to look like her and imitate what the press called “Lanallure.” She was a starlet for a very short period. By 1941, after four years and 14 (yes, 14!) movies, she became a full-fledged star in “Ziegfeld Girl” (1941).
The little girl from a whistle-stop mining town of Wallace, Idaho, born Julia Jean Mildred Frances Turner on Feb. 8, 1920, never planned to be a movie star.
Turner, of course, was the actress who lived Hollywood’s greatest Cinderella story - the one about being discovered sipping a soda at a drugstore on Sunset Boulevard (not Schwab’s, however) and being asked the time-honored question, “How would you like to be in pictures?”
After a bit part in the original “A Star Is Born” (1937), director Mervyn LeRoy cast her (as a girl who gets murdered in the first reel) in the anti-lynching melodrama, “They Won’t Forget.” Turner worked free-lance for Warner Bros. and United Artists, and, in 1938, was snapped up by MGM, which put her under contract and immediately cast her opposite Mickey Rooney in “Love Finds Andy Hardy” (1938).
She remained at MGM for the next 17 years, making 36 films for the studio. Although many of them were unmemorable, Turner managed to squeeze in several popular hits, including “Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde” and “Honky Tonk,” both in 1941.
And through the process of learning on the job, she also turned in several truly excellent performances - especially opposite John Garfield in “The Postman Always Rings Twice” (1946) and opposite Kirk Douglas in “The Bad and the Beautiful” (1952). While Turner might have left a lot to be desired as an actress earlier in her career, by the late ‘40s and early ‘50s whatever she needed to know must have sunk in.
In these latter roles, Turner somehow managed to combine sexuality (or what’s been described as “the promise of promiscuity”) with a certain poise and elegance.
In many ways, she found herself in the unique position of living a life that competed with the heat of her on-screen dramas: There were seven marriages (eight, if you count the two times she married restaurateur Stephen Crane), plus the scandal of the death of Johnny Stompanato, the underworld hoodlum who was murdered by Turner’s then 14-year-old daughter, Cheryl, in 1957. The killing was pronounced a justifiable homicide on the grounds that Cheryl was trying to protect her mother from Stompanato and the physical harm he might inflict.
It was at this time that Turner’s screen career really soared, with the actress giving an Oscar-nominated performance in the film version of “Peyton Place” (1957) and an Oscar-worthy one in Douglas Sirk’s remake of “Imitation of Life” (1959).
In these films, Turner was no longer a girl and no longer an inexperienced actress. Life had taught her how to suffer and survive and, once again, she turned lemons into lemonade.
And the audience responded - a new audience.
Now, she appealed to women - AND men who wondered if there could be happiness over the age of 40.
It wasn’t easy, but it was possible, her films said.
And THAT just about sums up the career of Lana Turner, too.
MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: LANA TURNER’S FILMS A rundown of Lana Turner’s films: “A Star Is Born” (1937) “They Won’t Forget” (1937) “The Great Garrick” (1937) “The Adventures of Marco Polo” (1938) “Four’s a Crowd” (1938) “Love Finds Andy Hardy” (1938) “The Chaser” (1938) “Rich Man, Poor Girl” (1938) “Dramatic School” (1938) “Calling Dr. Kildare” (1939) “These Glamour Girls” (1939) “Dancing Co-Ed” (1939) “Two Girls on Broadway” (1940) “We Who Are Young” (1940) “Ziegfeld Girl” (1941) “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (1941) “Honky Tonk” (1941) “Johnny Eager” (1942) “Somewhere I’ll Find You” (1942) “Slightly Dangerous” (1943) “The Youngest Profession” (1943) “DuBarry Was a Lady” (1943) “Marriage Is a Private Affair” (1944) “Keep Your Powder Dry” (1945) “Weekend at the Waldorf” (1945) “The Postman Always Rings Twice” (1946) “Green Dolphin Street” (1947) “Cass Timberlane” (1947) “Homecoming” (1948) “The Three Musketeers” (1948) “A Life of Her Own” (1950) “Mr. Imperium” (1951) “The Merry Widow” (1952) “The Bad and the Beautiful” (1952) “Latin Lovers” (1953) “The Flesh and the Flame” (1954) “Betrayed” (1954) “The Prodigal” (1955) “The Sea Chase” (1955) “The Rains of Ranchipur” (1955) “Diane” (1955) “Peyton Place” (1957) “The Lady Takes a Flyer” (1958) “Another Time, Another Place” (1958) “Imitation of Life” (1959) “Portrait in Black” (1960) “By Love Possessed” (1961) “Bachelor in Paradise” (1961) “Who’s Got the Action?” (1962) “Love Has Many Faces” (1965) “Madame X” (1966) “The Big Cube” (1969) “Persecution” (1974, a.k.a. “The Graveyard”) “The Terror of Sheba” (1974) “Bittersweet Love” (1976) “Witches’ Brew” (1978, released in 1980) -McClatchy News Service