Watched Murder, My Sweet last night. Anne Shirley is a knockout. Wow! I wish Eve was still around because I can barely find any pictures of her.
I love it when a 30-40s actress I’ve never noticed before pops up and is just gorgeous. She is amazing in that movie. Just stunning.
As an aside, damn they did terrible stuff to women’s hair back then. There is a scene at a nightclub where I couldn’t recognize her because of the awful hairdo. Claire Trevor had a couple tortuous hairstyles in the movie as well.
Nerds they may be, but not in Athena’s narrow, late-capitalist sense of technogeeks (producing/consuming nerds, ie: cool nerds).
However, there’s definitely a sense of the outgroup at work.
A good cultural studies theorist could probably quote Susan Sontag and a few other authors to make a reasonably airtight case that a straight male who crushes on 1930s/40s film actresses is - in some cultural affinity sense anyway - actually gay.
Such a theorist, however, would deserve a resounding slap upside the head.
I wondered on seeing the thread title if it was Anne of Green Gables or the actress. I haven’t seen that version of the movie in 10 or 12 years, but I always thought it was interesting that she changed her name when she got the part. Her real name was Dawn O’Day (which I knew without looking, but did double check it – sad).
She also auditioned for GWTW (along with every other actress and wannabe actress in the world), which makes me wonder if she’d have become Scarlett O’Hara if she got it.
Not Liza with a Z (but either way she’s a redhead orphan)
Anne Shirley was one of the wealthiest women in Hollywood in later years, though not so much for investments or business acumen as marriage. Her second husband was a successful producer/writer/director who happened to be the favorite nephew of [childless Hearst concubine] Marion Davies and was her primary heir. (Her estate was in the many millions and that was in 1961 money, and he managed it well.)
Simply reading this may have kicked me into another reread of the Green Gables books. It’s about time anyway, and I’ve been playing with the idea, but now I think I gotta go find them.
She was so striking looking with that “dead English woman” skin and red hair that I’m surprised she never became a much bigger star. According to her wiki she lives in both Toronto and L.A. so apparently she and/or her life-partner (male) are doing pretty well financially, so maybe she didn’t want to be bigger and wanted to be a stay-at-home mom, because I think that with the right agent and some drive she’d have been at least as big as a Kate Winslet or Gwyneth Paltrow.
Yup, I was too.