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Mary Astor: Diaries
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Mary Astor was more of a signifier back then than she is now. Her husband got hold of her diary and used it in their divorce proceedings. She’d had an affair with George S Kaufman, and she was pretty forthright about their sex life in the diary. It was a big scandal at the time – they were both very famous – so maybe they used her as shorthand for “bad girl” She was beautiful in a cookie cutter way back when she made silents, and not bad as Katherine Hepburn’s mother in Little Women but it would have taken a pretty spectacular face to overcome Bridget O’Shaughnessy’s haircut, which was incredibly bad.
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Mary was filming Dodsworth for Samuel Goldwyn. The film was too far along for her to be replaced on a morals clause; consequently, Goldwyn and other studio chiefs such as Louis B. Mayer and Harry Cohn of Columbia, to whom Mary was then under contract, lent support. The diary was never actually seen by the public, and reports of the contents were purely speculative. Mary won custody of Marylyn for six months of each year. She had asserted most of the pages of the diary submitted in court were forgeries. When Dodsworth was released, notices were excellent, and the film itself became a classic.
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Almost a has-been at 23, Fox executives told Astor they were not impressed with the way her voice recorded. But her performance in a hit play led to several studio offers, and she ably made the transition to sound. The coolly confident Astor image first emerges in Holiday where Astor proves more than a match for the film's star, Broadway-trained Ann Harding. Astor's career again looked as if it was in trouble when the scandal associated with her infamous diaries erupted. Some critics feel that the publicity surrounding her divorce and custody battle in 1936 has dulled recognition of her as work as an actress. Yet it appears that the scandal, and her "fortitude under stress" actually boosted her career, and helped reshape her star image, from ingenue to lovely but knowing woman-of-the-world, a transformation that allowed her to play the roles for which she is best remembered.
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