Diana Barrymore

Diana spent much of her childhood in boarding schools and Paris, seeing little of either parent. By age 14, she had already endured years of neglect, which she rebelled against by attending a dance in a lurid red satin dress with a plunging neckline. In 1937, she enrolled in the American Academy of Dramatic Art in New York, and by 1939 she was performing in summer stock in Maine for $10 a week. A year later, she was earning $150 a week in Chicago, working next door to her father's theater. At 19, she made her Broadway debut in "Romantic Mr. Dickens," and in January 1942, producer Walter Wanger brought her to Hollywood at $1,000 a week. She appeared in two of his films, including "Eagle Squadron" (1942) and "Ladies Courageous" (1944), and gave a standout performance in the film noir "Nightmare" (1942). Universal advertised her as "1942's Most Sensational New Screen Personality," but her career quickly faltered when she refused to work with Abbott and Costello and was put on unpaid suspension.

Her personal life was as turbulent as her career. She married Bramwell Fletcher in July 1942, John Robert Howard in January 1947, and Robert Wilcox in October 1950, and she divorced each of them. Her second husband was a tennis pro who got them arrested, and her third was an alcoholic who died of a heart attack in 1955. Diana struggled with alcoholism and depression throughout her life, and her mother's estate, once worth millions, was reduced to a mere $8,000 by 1952. She wrote her autobiography, "Too Much, Too Soon," in 1957, and it was later made into a film of the same name. She died on January 25, 1960, at age 38. Her life was a story of promise and waste, as she lamented in her book: "So much has been dreamed, so little done; there was so much promise and so much waste."