Gloria Dickson

In 1938, Gloria married makeup artist Perc Westmore, who pushed her toward a more glamorous image and convinced her to get a nose job. After leaving MGM, her career stalled, and she found herself in B-movies like Lady of Burlesque (1943) and The Affairs of Jimmy Valentine (1942). She divorced Perc and married director Ralph Murphy in 1941, but that marriage ended in divorce two years later. By 1944, Gloria was unemployed, overweight, and struggling with a serious alcohol problem. She married former boxer William Fitzgerald and rented a house in West Hollywood. On April 10, 1945, she was napping when a fire broke out. Trapped in a bathroom, she suffered second-degree burns and died from asphyxiation.

There is a grim irony to her death. In one of her final films, The Crime Doctor's Strangest Case (1943), she played the wife of a man who habitually started accidental fires with carelessly discarded smoking materials. The movie featured two such scenes, and just two years later, Gloria died in a house fire suspected to have been caused by a carelessly discarded cigarette. She is buried at Hollywood Forever cemetery, her tombstone reading "Thais A. Dickerson, My Baby."