Lana Turner (born Julia Jean Turner; February 8, 1921 – June 29, 1995) was an American actress. Over the course of her nearly 50-year career, she achieved fame as both a pin-up model and a film actress, as well as for her highly publicized personal life. In the mid-1940s, she was one of the highest-paid actresses in the United States, and one of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's (MGM) biggest stars, with her films earning more than $50 million for the studio during her 18-year contract with them. Turner is frequently cited as a popular culture icon of Hollywood glamour and a screen legend of classical Hollywood cinema.[4] She was nominated for many awards.
Born to working-class parents in northern Idaho, Turner spent her childhood there before her family relocated to California. In 1936, when Turner was 15, she was discovered while purchasing a soda at the Top Hat Malt Shop in Hollywood. At age 16, she was signed to a personal contract by Warner Bros. director Mervyn LeRoy, who took her with him when he transferred to MGM in 1938. She soon attracted attention by playing the role of a murder victim in her film debut, LeRoy's They Won't Forget (1937), and she later moved into supporting roles, often appearing as an ingénue.
In February 1940, Turner garnered significant publicity when she eloped to Las Vegas with 28-year-old bandleader Artie Shaw, her co-star in Dancing Co-Ed.[65][66] Though they had only briefly known each other, Turner recalled being "stirred by his eloquence", and after their first date the two spontaneously decided to get married.[67] Their marriage only lasted four months, but was highly publicized, and led MGM executives to grow concerned over Turner's "impulsive behavior".[68] In the spring of 1940, after the two had divorced, Turner discovered she was pregnant and had an abortion.[69] In contemporaneous press, it was noted she had been hospitalized for "exhaustion".[69] She would later recall that Shaw treated her "like an untutored blonde savage, and took no pains to conceal his opinion".[64] In the midst of her marriage to Shaw, she starred in We Who Are Young, a drama in which she played a woman who, against their employer's policy, marries her coworker.[70]
Shaw later married, from 1945 to 1946,
Ava Gardner.
Gardner's third and last marriage was to singer and actor Frank Sinatra, from
1951 to 1957. Gardner and Sinatra were undoubtedly the loves of each other's lives, but their six-year marriage was turbulent in the extreme and Sinatra was to accuse her publicly of a lesbian affair with another Hollywood sex goddess,
Lana Turner. Both women denied what Turner, in her 1982 memoirs, described as 'a lot of sick rumours' — yet the rumours persisted that one of the world's most desirable women was secretly attracted to her own sex.
An exhaustive biography of Gardner by Lee Server, published 16 years after her death, delicately conceded her 'continuing curiosity about the sexual demi-monde' and records that 'through the years [she] paid visits to gay bars, red-light zones and brothels all over the world'.
According to Micharl Thornton, who interviewed her, Gardner had indeed had a relationship with Lana Turner, and with several other high-profile female stars. She said: 'At MGM and all Hollywood studios in the Forties and Fifties, we had a morals clause in our contract. It could be terminated overnight by any behaviour that might bring the studio into disrepute. Today, no one would give a damn what two actresses got up to in private, but they sure as hell did then.'
After Shaw, Turner married other 6 times: Joseph Stephen Crane
(m. 1942; ann. 1943)
(m. 1943; div. 1944),
Bob Topping
(m. 1948; div. 1952),
Lex Barker
(m. 1953; div. 1957),
Fred May
(m. 1960; div. 1962),
Robert Eaton
(m. 1965; div. 1969),
Ronald Pellar
(m. 1969; div. 1972).
During the early 1940s, Turner established herself as a leading lady and one of MGM's top stars, appearing in such films as the film noir Johnny Eager (1941); the musical Ziegfeld Girl (1941); the horror film Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941); and the romantic war drama Somewhere I'll Find You (1942), one of several films in which she starred opposite
Clark Gable. Turner's reputation as a glamorous femme fatale was enhanced by her critically acclaimed performance in the noir The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), a role which established her as a serious dramatic actress. Her popularity continued through the 1950s in dramas such as The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) and Peyton Place (1957), the latter for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress.
Intense media scrutiny surrounded the actress in 1958 when her teenaged daughter Cheryl Crane stabbed Turner's lover Johnny Stompanato to death in their home during a domestic struggle. Her next film, Imitation of Life (1959), proved to be one of the greatest commercial successes of her career, and her starring role in Madame X (1966) earned her a David di Donatello Award for Best Foreign Actress. Turner spent most of the 1970s in semi-retirement, making her final film appearance in 1980. In 1982, she accepted a much-publicized and lucrative recurring guest role in the television series Falcon Crest, which afforded the series notably high ratings.
In 1992, Turner was diagnosed with throat cancer and died of the disease three years later, aged 74.
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