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Tallulah Bankhead
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Tallulah Bankhead was an actress whose talents were greatly overshadowed by her antics. Indeed, the Bankhead personality was much better known than her acting roles. While it is impossible to study her career without exploring her highly charged personality, this bio-bibliography honors Tallulah Bankhead, the actress. In a career that spanned five decades, she conquered practically every medium of entertainment--theater, film, radio, and television--leaving her mark in each one. Biographers have several times attempted to chronicle her life, but Bankhead remains too original, too unconventional, too colorful to be captured fully on paper. What can be noted are her many accomplishments--which have previously been ignored.
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Tallulah Bankhead was one of last century's first show business personalities. The daughter of an Alabama Senator, Bankhead's mother died three weeks after her birth. After winning a beauty contest at the age of 16, she headed to New York City to start an acting career. Bypassing the casting couch to earn a role in "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," at eighteen she left for Paris to volunteer for the Red Cross.
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Canada Lee and actress Tallulah Bankhead, though far apart on the social continuum of Jim Crow America, were friends as well as colleagues; they had similarly progressive views on politics, race relations, and sexual morality. Besides traveling in the same circles and supporting the same liberal causes, the two worked together on-screen in Lifeboat, a 20th Century-Fox melodrama directed by Alfred Hitchcock, about a group of Americans adrift on a raft with a German from the U-Boat that torpedoed their ship. In the film, which is loosely based on a treatment by John Steinbeck, Bankhead plays a worldly journalist and Lee -- reportedly against his better judgment -- appears as a sailor whose servile character would be politically verboten in a Hollywood screenplay today. Yet, except for Cry, the Beloved Country at the end of his life, Lee never had a screen opportunity to match Lifeboat.
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Though Tallulah Bankhead's career slowed in the mid-1950s, she never faded from the public eye. Although a heavy drinker and consumer of sleeping pills (she was a life-long insomniac), Bankhead continued to perform in the 1950s and 1960s on Broadway, in the occasional film, as a highly-popular radio show host, and in the new medium of television. Her appearance as herself on The Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Comedy Hour in 1957 as The Celebrity Next Door is a cult favorite, as is her role as the "Black Widow" on the 1960s campy television show Batman, which turned out to be her final screen appearance. In an effort to cut into the rating leads of The Jack Benny Program and The Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy Show which had jumped from NBC radio to CBS radio the previous season, NBC spent millions over the two seasons of 1950-51 and 1951-52 to diminish Benny's and Bergen's high ratings with The Big Show starring "the glamorous, unpredictable" Tallulah Bankhead as its host, in which she acted not only as mistress of ceremonies but ... performed monologues and songs [15]. Despite Meredith Willson's Orchestra and Chorus and top guest stars from Broadway, Hollywood and radio--including Fred Allen, Fanny Brice, Groucho Marx, Ethel Merman, Gracie Fields, Vera Lynn, Jimmy Durante, Martin & Lewis, George Jessel, Judy Garland, Ethel Barrymore, Gloria Swanson, José Ferrer and Judy Holliday, The Big Show, which earned rave reviews, failed to do more than dent Jack Benny's and Edgar Bergen's ratings. Tallulah, who proved a masterful comedienne and intriguing personality, however, was not blamed for the failure of The Big Show--television was hurting all radio ratings, so the next season (1952-53)NBC installed Tallu as one of a half dozen rotating hosts of NBC's The All Star Revue on Saturday nights.
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When Tallulah Bankhead appeared with the play in Birmingham a year earlier at the Temple Theatre, on February 11 and 12, 1941, the reviews had been more euphoric. Critic Vincent Townsend wrote after Bankhead's first performance: "Birmingham found out Tuesday night why THE LITTLE FOXES is one of the most talked of plays of the day, and why Miss Bankhead has been hailed as one of the greatest actresses of the day. Lillian Hellman, who wrote THE LITTLE FOXES, has created in Regina Hubbard Giddens a woman who knew what she wanted, a character that will long be remembered on the stage. Miss Bankhead has taken the Hellman creation and made it her own by breathing into the role all the nervous energy for which she is famous."
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Tallulah Bankhead was born into one of the most notable families in Alabama at that time. Her grandfather was a United States Senator, and her father, William B. Bankhead, served as Speaker of the House of Representatives. Her uncle was U. S. Senator John H. Bankhead. Marie Bankhead Owen, her aunt became Director of the Alabama State Archives, the first woman to head a department of Alabama state government.
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Tallulah Bankhead