Actors - Lana Turner

Home > Listing Index > Actors > Lana Turner

	Actors - Lana Turner

Lana Turner (February 8, 1921 – June 29, 1995) was an American actress famed early in her career for her appearances in tight sweaters, and her smoldering sensuality, and later in her career for sudsy romance films with maximal glamorous evening gowns and tragedy.

Biography

The name on her birth certificate, as she stated in her autobiography, was Julia Jean Turner, not Julia Jean Mildred Frances Turner as many sources claim. In any case, she was called "Judy" as a child and became Lana Turner when she became an actress. She was born in Wallace, Idaho. Her father was John Virgil Turner, who was born and raised in Hohenwald, Tennessee. John Virgil Turner was a clerk and a gambler who was murdered when she was a child. Her mother was Mildred Frances Cowan who was about 15 when she married John Virgil Turner.

Lana was discovered at the age of 15 in 1936 at the Top Hat Café in Hollywood by film journalist William R. Wilkerson, who introduced her to actor/comedian/talent agent Zeppo Marx. She was soon signed by MGM.

Turner earned the nickname the "Sweater Girl" due to a scene in her debut movie They Won't Forget (1937), in which her bosom bounced in a tight sweater. She reached the height of her fame in the 1940's and 1950's. During World War II, Turner became a popular pin-up girl due to her popularity in such films such as Ziegfeld Girl, Johnny Eager
, and two films with MGM's king of the lot: Clark Gable (the films' successes were only heightened by gossip column rumors about a relationship between the two).

After the war, Turner's career hit a new high with the classic 1946 film noir The Postman Always Rings Twice
, co-starring John Garfield. During the 1950's, Turner's films started to flop at the box-office, until she starred in Vincente Minnelli's masterpiece The Bad and the Beautiful
and later the big screen adaptation of Grace Metalious's best-selling novel Peyton Place in which she earned an Academy Award for Best Actress. Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life
also proved a big commercial success. Critics and audiences couldn't help noticing that both Peyton and Imitation borrowed from Turner's private life -- a single mother coping with a troubled teenage daughter.

Personal Life

Off-screen, Turner was married eight times to seven different husbands, and had many lovers, including Tyrone Power (whom she calls the love of her life in her autobiography), Howard Hughes (who is reported to have given her syphilis), and a minor gangster named Johnny Stompanato who was fatally stabbed by Turner's daughter, Cheryl Crane. (The killing was deemed a justifiable homicide by coroner's inquest.)

Her husbands were:

Bandleader Artie Shaw (1940);
Actor
-restaurateur Josef Stephen Crane (1942-1943, 1943-44);
*She married Crane a second time, after their first marriage was annulled because a previous marriage of his had not yet been finalized.
Millionaire socialite Henry J. Topping, Jr. (1948-52);
Actor Lex Barker
(1953-57), whom she divorced after her daughter Cheryl claimed that he molested her;
Rancher Fred May (1960-62);
Businessman Robert Eaton (1965-69);
Nightclub hypnotist Ronald Peller (a.k.a. Ronald Dante) (1969-72).

Later Life

In the 1970s and 1980s, Turner appeared in several television roles, but the majority of her final decade was spent out of the public eye.

She died rather suddenly at the age of 74 in 1995 of complications from the throat cancer which was diagnosed in 1992, and which she had been battling ever since, at her home in Century City, California.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Lana Turner ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article Lana Turner; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Actors - Lana Turner

Biography

Personal Life

Later Life

Searches on eBay

Related searches on eBay