Gloria Grahame

The 1950s brought her a Best Supporting Actress Oscar and typecast her as shady, inimitably sultry ladies in seven well-known film-noir classics. However, rumors of being difficult to work with on the set of Oklahoma! (1955) sidelined her film career from 1956 onward. She also endured marital and child-custody troubles. After divorcing Nicholas Ray, who was 12 years her senior, and a subsequent marriage to Cy Howard that ended in divorce, she married her former stepson Anthony Ray in 1960, who was almost 14 years younger than she was. This led both former husbands to sue for custody of their respective children, fueling gossip columns and scandal sheets. The stress contributed to a nervous breakdown, for which she underwent electroconvulsive therapy. Yet her marriage to Anthony "Tony" Ray proved happy and became her longest, lasting almost 14 years and producing two children, Anthony Jr. and James.

In 1960, she resumed stage acting, combined with TV work and, from 1970, some mostly inferior films. She was described as a serious, skillful actress; spontaneous, honest, and strong-willed; imaginative and curious; incredibly sexy but insecure about her looks, prompting plastic surgery on her famous lips; loving appreciative male company; "a bit loony." In 1975, she was treated for breast cancer, and in 1980 she was diagnosed with cancer again. She moved to England in 1978. Her busy period of British and American stage work ended abruptly in 1981 when she collapsed from cancer symptoms during a rehearsal. She wished to remain in Liverpool with her partner, Peter Turner, who was almost 30 years her junior. After Turner notified her children, two of them flew to England to retrieve her, insisting she return to the United States. She died a few hours later that same day of stomach cancer and peritonitis at St. Vincent's Hospital in Manhattan on October 5, 1981, at age 57.