Gloria Swanson
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Best films:
Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950) Cecil DeMille's The Affairs of Anatol (1921) Erich von Stroheim's Queen Kelly (1929) Leo McCarey's Indiscreet (1931) Allan Dwan's Zaza (1923) Raoul Walsh's Sadie Thompson (1928) | Links: |
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Gloria Swanson (1899) left Chicago for Hollywood
in 1916 to play in Mack Sennett's slapsticks.
She was soon discovered by
Cecil DeMille who directed her in Male and Female (1919),
For Better For Worse (1919),
Don't Change Your Husband (1919),
Why Change Your Wife? (1920),
Something to Think About (1920),
and especially
The Affairs of Anatol (1921), the film in which she famously
wore an amethyst, emerald and gold necklace.
She clearly represented a femininity that was the opposite of
Lilian Gish's: where Gish was a sensitive ingenue, Swanson was a smart
and cunning woman.
Sam Wood directed her next to Rudolph Valentino in Beyond the Rocks (1922) and several other films. Then it was
Allan Dwan's turn to directed her in films like
Zaza (1923),
The Coast of Folly (1925) and Stage Struck (1925).
A terrible business woman, she launched her own production companies, but lost
money despite some of her best performances in
Raoul Walsh's Sadie Thompson (1928),
Erich von Stroheim's Queen Kelly (1929) and
Edmund Goulding's The Trespasser (1929), which was a sound film.
She lived lavishly, true to her stereotypical role of
glamorous erotic aristocrat.
The age of talkies was cruel to her, just like to many other stars of silent
cnema. After Leo McCarey's Indiscreet (1931) and
Mervyn LeRoy's Tonight or Never (1931), her career declined to the point
that in 1939 she moved to New York and opened a firm to commercialize
technological inventions. The firm failed but Swanson continued to tinker with
her own inventions, even pioneering wireless communications in 1942.
If Gish meant a sentimental life of love and suffering, Swanson meant a materialistic life of money and sex. She gave her most memorable performance in Billy Wilder's masterpiece Sunset Boulevard (1950). She married eight times.
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