Gloria Grahame is one of my favourite actresses, mostly for her low-life noir characters. Now I’ll have to get hold of The Bad and the Beautiful, for which she won Best Supporting Actress Oscar. Her second husband was Nicholas Ray, who directed her in the wonderful In a Lonely Place. Her fourth husband was Ray’s son by a previous marriage. In other words she married her stepson, which meant that her son with Ray senior found that his half-brother was his new stepdad. She came from a British stage family and, after her film roles dried up, she worked in television and in plays such as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, often in the UK. Her final illness began in Lancaster where she was rehearsing for The Glass Menagerie.

So the author - - a theatre producer and fan - - has plenty of material, and he does it justice. It’s not a scholarly book but seems balanced and well sourced, even though the ‘Suicide Blonde’ title has no link to real events. Copies of the book are usually expensive (by my standards). This one cost me just ten pounds including postage from the US, so never mind that it’s a former New York Public Library copy with the photo section ripped out.

Not sure I can separate how I felt about the book from how fascinated I became about the actress and the history presented here. Knew virtually nothing about Gloria Grahame and was drawn in to the film industry as presented here. Often found the author doing more commentary on her life than just writing her bio though and it was distracting. Also, crazy long paragraphs and a few times where future incidents were alluded to and felt out of order from the chronological sequence of the book, made it harder to read. Really felt like I would like to know more about this woman!

Insightful. I was riveted to the life story of a conflicted actress and her mental and emotional angst. The time period is so compelling for learning about the morals and lack thereof among the Hollywood crowd. Previous expectations of celebrities was that they lived by strict moral codes, and nothing could be further than the truth. As Kenneth Anger once observed, Hollywood was and IS Babylon.

What a life!

If you've ever seen In A Lonely Place, you know what a fine actor Gloria Grahame was. Why she is not better known to the public at large is due to actions on her part, especially in regards to Oklahoma. That's a shame. This is a very interesting biography about a very complicated woman.

Gloria Grahame should have been institutionalized. Read it and see if you agree.

Every once in a while, a celebrity will have such a hold on my attention that I'm intrigued to know who they actually are beyond the sheen. Through films like In A Lonely Place, The Big Heat and Human Desire, erstwhile screen siren Gloria Grahame became one of those for me. Curcio's book is inexplicably the only one about her, and even less explicably is now out of print. This is unfortunate as Grahame was an intriguing, audacious woman who deserved better than this poorly laid-out love-letter from an ardent fan.
Grahame was a woman whose career was pretty solidly engineered by her mother, who continued to keep a firm grasp on Grahame's life both personally and professionally while they both lived. Grahame was wilful, singularly sexual and unwilling to be moulded into anything she wasn't, and in the Hollywood that was this would only ever end badly. There were moments early in her career that indicated a bright future for her, but inevitably she always managed to steer clear of real stardom.
Curcio's writing is fluid and engaging, but he seems to have struggled with structure: his narrative lacks a flow necessary to telling the tale of a person's life, which is often jarring. His research is questionable, leaning (perhaps necessarily) too much on (notoriously incorrect) fan magazines of the time and on decades-later memories from the handful of people he was able to interview. At one point, he makes such a glaring error (saying that Fritz Lang directed Murnau's silent vampire classic film Nosferatu) that I found I questioned much of the information he gave thereafter.
As the only game going to learn about an unabashedly interesting actress of yesteryear, this could have been worse. But as her sole biography, it should have been better.

It's unfortunate that this is the only really definitive biography of Gloria Grahame out there (and it's even out of print). The book reeks of a casual sexism that no one would have likely blinked an eye at when it was written--it zooms through her professional work and instead lingers on her romantic failures and her maternal tribulations. Most unsettling, it both worships and tears down Grahame's vulnerabilities focusing on why she was difficult to work with and how she was troubled rather than addressing that in a larger context of her life and work (tbh the book pretty much lost me the moment it suggested that all of Gloria's life problems stemmed from her heavy, painful periods and the way they made her behave). I hope someone out there someday will give Grahame the due she deserves because it certainly isn't to be found here.

Bio of a "B" starlet famous for her noir roles and winning a best supporting actress Oscar - she lived the 40's/50's Hollywood cliche. Probably best known for marrying her step-son. Well researched but a little dry.

I almost gave the book three stars because it wasn't a particularly pleasant read, but the writing at the end (the inglorious end of Grahame's life) was quite thoughtful, so I decided that any lack of pleasure in reading the book rested with the subject and not the author. He has a difficult job of making the book compelling, as Gloria was not an easy person to know. As a star, I already felt that I knew her quite well, occasionally rolling my eyes as her name appeared in the credits of one 50s melodrama or noir after another, usually playing a mild variation of the sexually frustrated wife or too-knowing moll. I know most of the facts of her life, particularly her marriage to Nicholas Ray, the behind-the-scenes of "In a Lonely Place", marriage to Tony Ray, and her later career in the theater. This book helped put all of those into a coherent chronology by filling in the gaps, most notably her tumultuous third marriage, her protracted divorce/custody battles with husbands #3 & #4, and her fall from grace due to not just marriage #4 with Tony Ray, but also completely ruining her reputation on the set of "Oklahoma!" where she was difficult not just with lighting, blocking, and of course, makeup, but also removed from the actors (and supposedly kicked Charlotte Greenwood out of frame once).

She seemed to operate in a world sealed off from others, which became especially noticeable as an actress in stage rehearsals. She was intelligent but could make people do things for her by acting helpless. She was very sharp regarding business deals for film/TV but had strange ideas about how to act on the set -- consistently not hitting her marks or intentionally staying out of the light, or focusing on how her lips were made up and not caring about the rest. She would latch onto an idea and stick with it beyond all reason (her plastic surgery around her mouth being the most notable example). Yet she couldn't make up her mind whether she should be a leading lady or a character actress.

She's just a difficult star to know. I recommend this book to anyone who has found her fascinating, as her career is different than most other actresses of the era due to her idiosyncrasies and the extreme natures of her marriages. As a mother, she could be somewhat careless or remote, but she seemed to try very hard to provide an inheritance for all four of her children in the last few years of her life, accruing $100,000 through theater work and a few TV gigs. As a wife, she tried very hard to be a homemaker, but once it was apparent she was not going to be ultimately successful at it, she wanted to get back to work. She seemed to exist in sort of a haze of her own creation, and the people who had long relationships with her knew how to negotiate with her by keeping communication on a very concrete, strictly factual basis. Hollywood, however, found her solitary and inflexible, unable to create a whole person of herself that could relate to the wants and needs of her co-workers. Even when working in theater where she was allowed to focus on her craft, she never verbalized her thinking and left the actors and directors mystified.

I do not recommend this book if you or someone close to you is going through a long custody battle, as most of the 1960s are filled with these details and it is very exhausting if you are going through it yourself.