biography
| name: |
Swanson, Gloria
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| |
originally Gloria Josephine Mae Swenson or Svensson
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pronunciation:
[swonsn]
| sex:
| female
|
| lived:
| (1897–1983)
|
| biography:
| Film actress, born in Chicago, Illinois, USA. Of Swedish-Italian descent, she was hired as an extra in a Chicago film studio (1915), and there she met film actor Wallace Beery, whom she married (1916) and accompanied to Hollywood. She made many short romantic films for Mack Sennett, and then a series of sentimental dramas for Triangle Productions, before being hired by Cecil B De Mille. By the mid-1920s she had become the most popular and glamorous of Hollywood actresses (and was on her third husband). Backed by Joseph Kennedy, father of the later president, she began producing her own films, but lost heavily on von Stroheim's Queen Kelly (1938). She made a few sound films, then retired (1934), made a single film in 1941, Father Takes a Wife, and then made a sensational comeback in Sunset Boulevard (1950), where she played an evocation of her actual self. She made a few more films, promoted cosmetics, fashions, and health foods, starred on Broadway in Butterflies are Free (1971), and took a sixth husband (1976), but was never able to recapture what Sunset Boulevard had so vividly portrayed. |
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