Lawrence tierney biography
While her character is perfectly made-up and seemingly in control, her mind seems ravaged by destructive impulses.
Her beauty is also key in Otto Preminger's film noir Laura , a hypnotic story of infatuation and murder. These days, few non-cinephiles are likely to recall Tierney's name, but to see her in Laura is to remember her forever. The story revolves around a detective's obsessive search for a murdered woman after growing intrigued by a painting of her.
It has shades of many dreamy, sex-and-death obsessed mysteries made since, from Hitchcock's Vertigo to several of David Lynch's works. Pivotally, the film's place in the cultural imagination stems from that painting of Tierney as Laura: her beauty is captured in time forever in this manner, precluding the real-life risks of ageing and mortality. This can't help but feel like an apt metaphor about the relationship between a star's beauty being captured and frozen in time in celluloid film, too.
As Elena Parker, the founder of Gene Tierney Online and her forthcoming biographer, tells the BBC: "Gene expressed appreciation that she continued to be identified with Laura long after the conclusion of her career, rather than not being remembered at all. While the enduring power of Laura may not have necessarily furthered her acting legacy, it has bestowed on Gene longevity in beauty culture.
The BFI season offers a corrective to the powerful narrative of Tierney's beauty, or to her tragic personal life, which often has taken up more air than her films she suffered from mental health struggles and an unlucky exposure to rubella during her first pregnancy, which would leave her daughter severely disabled. Cliches of "tragic beauty" or the "prettiness that helped destroy her" are an old morality play and nothing more.
Tierney wrote in her memoir Self-Portrait of her appearance and her time in mental health facilities: "I have always needed to believe that my career survived on more than how I looked. I have no deeper meaning to plumb, no point to make about beauty and craziness. A friend once asked a doctor if he thought my life might have been easier, if I might not have needed confining, if I had been less pretty.
It may seem quaint to look all the way back to Tierney, one of the stars of the s, as a signifier of female beauty. After all, we might be inclined to think that a great deal has changed since. Then, body diversity was not remotely of interest; in Tierney's Hollywood, a woman's shape should be slim and hourglass, with diets, corsets and S-shaped dresses to reinforce that.
Nor was comfort of interest: it was a time before baggy jeans, fluffy-brow trends, or athleisure. There was an extremely narrow ideal of attractive femininity — white, thin, coiffed, manicured, and with no visible freckles, fat, or racial difference unless they were playing a role that should have gone to a person of colour to begin with, and usually did not.
And so the all-male studio heads and their teeming departments of make-up artists saw to that, with putty to apply to crooked noses and careful diagrams of star faces which they sought to categorise by shape and then correct with cosmetics and hairstyle. As Cathy Lomax, an artist and Hollywood makeup expert with a PhD in star studies and cosmetics, writes in her thesis Making Up the Star: Makeup, Femininity, Race and Ageing in Hollywood, — "This eschewing of realism extended to the, all but identical, make-up worn by stars.
Both Leave Her to Heaven and Laura , her two most famous movies, are screening but so are plenty of other titles that show her in a very different light. In the film, Tierney plays a kleptomaniac who comes under the spell of a hypnotist. Tierney was dismissed twice over during her lifetime.
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Early on, her looks stopped her from being taken seriously. In her latter years, she was regarded in equally patronising and belittling fashion as a tragic case, another of those unhappy stars who had quite simply gone mad in Hollywood. The BFI season should remind audiences that Tierney was a major talent. Her career may have been brutally interrupted but it still stretched to around 40 films.
She was a diamond of the screen, one whose brilliance is ripe for rediscovery. If you are experiencing feelings of distress, or are struggling to cope, you can speak to the Samaritans, in confidence, on UK and ROI , email jo samaritans.
Gene tierney photo gallery
This is a free, confidential crisis hotline that is available to everyone 24 hours a day, seven days a week. If you are in another country, you can go to www. Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies. Paul Terry. Simone Simon. Logan Williams. Song Kang-Ho.
Gene tierney biography filmography
Ekaterina Kmit. Elena Shamova. Television credits [ edit ]. Radio appearances [ edit ]. Quotes [ edit ].
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By Tierney [ edit ]. Cultural references [ edit ]. See also [ edit ]. Portal : Biography. References [ edit ]. The New York Times. Retrieved November 21, Turner Classics Movies. Retrieved August 20, Tierney emerged as a leading lady of equal beauty and depth Gene Tierney: A Biography. ISBN Tierney and Herskowitz Wyden Books.
BBC Culture. Retrieved April 29, Vol 8, No. Chronicle Books. Leading Ladies. Archived from the original on February 7, Retrieved February 1, Retrieved February 27, Baltimore Magazine.
Retrieved October 29, Retrieved January 18, The Topeka Capital-Journal. September 13, Retrieved August 20, — via Legacy. The Home of Agatha Christie. Retrieved April 8, — via agathachristie. Los Angeles Times. Harrisburg Telegraph. Retrieved July 23, — via Newspapers. Pottstown Mercury. Vanity Fair.
February 18, Retrieved July 5, Courthouse News Service. Archived from the original on August 20, February 27, Louella's Movie Go Round. Albuquerque Journal. Howard Lee". August 18, Archived from the original on May 15, Retrieved January 7, March 26, Wesleyan University. Retrieved October 7, Nostalgia Digest. Summer October 5, Retrieved October 1, — via Newspapers.
October 26, Retrieved September 29, — via Newspapers. Gene Tierney".
Gene tierney biography self portrait: Gene Tierney () was an American actress, singer, and fashion icon. Renowned for her captivating beauty and mesmerizing blue eyes, Tierney was dubbed the "Goddess of Glamour" of.
Archived from the original on April 6, Retrieved May 6, Tierney, a classic beauty, may at first seem too elegant to be a sex symbol, but her Oscar-nominated performance as the femme fatale in Leave Her to Heaven firmly established her sexy cred. Plus, Tierney owned her look. She didn't let studio executives mess with her hair color or length, and refused to fix a slight overbite , earning extra sexy points for confidence.
Bibliography [ edit ].