Gene Tierney

Gene Tierney arrived in Hollywood with a jaw that looked sculpted by a surgeon and eyes that changed color depending on the spotlight. In 1939, she turned down a contract with Columbia because they wanted her to fix her teeth. She knew her imperfection was her greatest asset.

Darryl F. Zanuck ended up falling at her feet and gave her a salary of two thousand dollars a week at Fox. The mogul realized that this girl from a well-off Brooklyn family did not need any touch-ups. She only needed a camera that knew how to capture her apparent coolness.

And the gamble paid off.

The Cheekbones That Captivated Zanuck

Her first major breakthrough came with The Return of Frank James, directed by Fritz Lang. But it was the year 1944 that fixed her image in the minds of viewers around the world. In Laura she barely appears during the first half hour of the film, yet her presence fills everything through a portrait. Otto Preminger filmed her as if she were a tangible ghost.

That film earned two million dollars at the time and put her at the top of the industry. Tierney was not the best actress of her generation, but she had a magnetism that made the rest of the cast look like cardboard. Her beauty was not comforting, however; it was unsettling to the male audience of the postwar era.

But her luck on set did not translate into domestic peace. During World War II, she caught rubella while pregnant with her first daughter. A fan approached her at a charity event to say that, while sick and quarantined, she had sneaked out of the house just to see her in person. Tierney merely looked at her in silence as she came to understand the cause of her daughter Daria's blindness and deafness.

Agatha Christie drew on that real-life episode to write The Mirror Cracked years later.

The Fall and Return to Houston

In 1945 she received her only Oscar nomination for Leave Her to Heaven. She played a possessive woman who lets her brother-in-law drown in a lake without moving a single facial muscle. It was her best technical work. But bouts of depression and constant stays in psychiatric institutions began to outweigh her filming plans.

She underwent electroshock treatments that erased part of her memory. As a result, movies stopped being an absolute priority for her during much of the 1950s. She tried working as a salesgirl in a clothing store to regain a sense of normalcy, far from the studio spotlight.

Movies stopped being a priority.

In 1962 she accepted a supporting role in Advise & Consent under Preminger's direction once again. It was a worthy comeback that showed her face could still hold a close-up without any tricks. But her interest in acting had almost completely evaporated in favor of a quieter life in Texas.

She married magnate Howard Lee in 1960 and found some financial and emotional stability. In 1979 she published her memoir, Self-Portrait, in which she candidly recounted her nervous breakdowns and romantic failures. She died on November 6, 1991 from pulmonary emphysema after a life of smoking three packs of cigarettes a day.

He was 70 years old.