Gloria Grahame: Thursday Great Acting Blogging

Gloria Grahame:

Wow, what a hot mama! Gloria Grahame pretty much exemplified sex in the late 1940s and early 1950s - she was essentially cast as the sexpot in most of her movies. But Grahame brought a whole lot more than her incredible looks to the screen - there's always another, much deeper side to every one of her "babe" roles. Much of her career was spent working for some of the most politically challenging directors in America - for Dmytryk in Crossfire, for Nicholas Ray in In A Lonely Place, for Fritz Lang in The Big Heat and Human Desire, for Robert Wise / Abraham Polonsky in Odds Against Tommorrow, for Nicholas Ray and Josef v. Sternberg in Macao though she also appeared in Oklahoma! and Minnelli's The Cobweb and The Bad and the Beautiful.

Unfortunately for Grahame, her personal life was considerably troubled. She married Nicholas Ray, who was bisexual, highly neurotic, a compulsive gambler and an alcoholic - while all that helped make him one of the greatest directors ever, it certainly didn't make for a satisfactory home life.