In spite of this, her Hollywood career is dogged by poor reviews, with critics seemingly resentful of her privileged background and striking looks – as if those advantages preclude or negate talent, determination and persistence. The following year, Gene Tierney is nominated for an Oscar for her performance in Leave Her to Heaven (1945). So he sends Gene to pose for Frank Powolny, chooses one of the shots from the session and has a blow-up made and lightly brushed over with paint to create the desired effect.

When Mamoulian is fired, his successor Otto Preminger decides that the portrait lacks mystery. Gene Tierney glances over her shoulder.Īs an aside, in the first instance Laura was to be directed by Rouben Mamoulian and he commissions his wife Acadia, a popular Hollywood artist, to paint the portrait of Laura, which plays such an iconic part in the movie. More offers from Hollywood drop through her letterbox and she ends up signing for Twentieth Century-Fox, whose founder, Darryl F Zanuck, a notorious womanizer, hails her as “unquestionably the most beautiful woman in movie history.” At almost eighteen I knew I could make the grade with a studio.īack on Broadway, she gets a break in the critically acclaimed The Male Animal, as a result of which she features in LIFE, Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. Ask mother and dad! I declined to Fade Out. I’d come to Hollywood, fizzled ignominiously, and was fated to be forgotten. And when option time came I got the axe, anyhow. I was A Failure … I did what I could to grin and bear it. … On my second day, way back three years ago, I was unceremoniously taken out and Frances Dee took over the role. Eventually I was cast in a picture, opposite Randolph Scott.

There was no rush to take portrait sittings, to pose in the latest fashions. I wandered and wondered about the Columbia lot, a mystery to everyone including mother and me. With her father’s help, she embarks on a career as a stage actress and in double-quick time makes it to Broadway, which quickly takes her back to Hollywood, as revealed in a 1941 interview with Screenland:Ĭolumbia originally brought me out, after two minor roles in Broadway attempts. I suppose that thousands of girls of my generation talked that way, and some of them meant it, but most wound up as carhops or returned home to marry their boyfriends. In my circle you finished school, married a Yale boy, and lived in Connecticut. She returns home determined to become an actress and help the family out financially, now that her father’s business has fallen on hard times.

A rare, early shot of Gene Tierney on her bed at her parents’ house.

Self portrait by gene tierney