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Lana Turner
built 605 days ago
Lana Turner was born Julia Jean Mildred Frances Turner, on February 8, 1920, in Wallace, Idaho. After her father, Virgil, a gambler and bootlegger, was murdered, the young Turner and her mother, Mildred, moved to San Francisco and in 1935, they moved to Los Angeles. Though many people think that Lana was discovered drinking a soda in Schwabs drugstore she was actually discovered at the age of 15, in the Top Hat Caffe by William R. Wilkerson, the publisher of the Hollywood Reporter. Wilkerson introduced Turner to Zeppo Marx, who owned his own casting agency, and Marx in turn sent her to the director Mervyn LeRoy. LeRoy cast Lana in the thriller, "They Won't Forget" (1937), in which she had a brief, but noticeable part wearing a form-fitting skirt and sweater. Shortly thereafter, she signed a contract at the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio.
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Lana Turner was a poor girl from Idaho who moved to Los Angeles with her mother after her father had been murdered in a gambling incident. She was famously, and apocryphally, 'discovered' in Schwab's soda fountain when she was sixteen. She became 'the sweater girl' then—a name she earned by wearing thinly lined bras beneath her jumpers—and died in 1995 at the age of seventy-five (or seventy-four, depending on whose version you believe) having spent the years in between living up to what she called her 'trademark' faculties: her platinum hair, her glossy pout, her pin-up's legs. Cheryl Crane recalled that she never saw her mother without make-up. Her roles reflected her life to a stunning degree—or perhaps it was vice versa—the drinking, the marriages, the mothering, the murders. There was always a touch of the simulacrum about her; she might stand for every star who ever changed her name or her looks—others were better dissemblers, but part of Lana Turner's fleshy vibrancy was that her roots, so to speak, were always showing.
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Nora Taylor (Lana Turner) has $37,000,00 but thinks every man she meets prefers her bankbook figure to her own, and that include her current fiance, Paul Chevron (John Lund), who has $48,000,000 of his own. ...more about Latin Lovers
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Synopsis: Based on an operetta by Franz Lehar, this remake of the 1934 original finds a wealthy widow (Lana Turner) returning to her husband's native land to dedicate a memorial to him. The king (Thomas Gomez) of the country, deep in debt, tries to convince her to stay by offering a young count (Fernando LamasRead More
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Lana Turner reigned as one of Hollywood's box-office queens for more than two decades. Real life was much trampier. Her father, a miner in Idaho, was murdered after winning a craps game. She loved to hang out with men of ill repute and would eventually marry seven times. One marriage, to the actor Lex Barker, would end in 1957 after she accused him of molesting her daughter by a previous marriage, Cheryl Crane. True to her failings, she began a torrid and tumultuous affair with Johnny Stompanato, a man suspected of mob ties.
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One of the most glamorous superstars of Hollywood's golden era, Lana Turner was born February 8, 1921, in Wallace, ID. At the age of 15, while cutting school, she was spotted by Hollywood Reporter staffer Billy Wilkinson in a Hollywood drugstore; enchanted by her beauty, he escorted her to the offices of the Zeppo Marx Agency, resulting in a bit part in 1937's A Star Is Born. Rejected by RKO, Fox, and any number of other studios, Turner next briefly showed up in They Won't Forget. Mervin LeRoy, the picture's director, offered her a personal contract at 50 dollars a week, and she subsequently appeared fleetingly in a series of films at Warner Bros. When LeRoy moved to MGM, Turner followed, and the usual series of bit parts followed before she won her first lead role in the 1939 B-comedy These Glamour Girls. Dancing Co-Ed, a vehicle for bandleader Artie Shaw, followed that same year, and after starring in 1940's Two Girls on Broadway, she and Shaw married.
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Lana Turner